Democracy, Threats and Political Repression in Developing Countries: Are Democracies Internally Less Violent?

Although previous research on the correlates of political repression has found a negative linear relationship between democracy and repression, we maintain that the relationship is more complex. We focus instead on the role of threats as a key precipitant to political repression and contend that scholars should attend to both non-linearities in analyses of political repression as well as Fein’s (1995) argument that states with intermediate levels of democracy (i.e. semidemocracies) are more likely to repress. Such an orientation leads us to hypothesize that there is an inverted U relationship between regime type and political repression. In this article we examine this relationship for 91 less developed countries over the period 1979-92. The findings support the thesis and indicate that (1) the level of threat is positively and significantly associated with political repression; (2) the level of threat has a greater impact than regime type on the likelihood of political repression; and (3) controlling for the level of threat, less developed states with intermediate levels of democracies—semi-democracies—have the highest levels of political repression.