Efforts to reduce the levels of political repression in less developed countries (LDCs) have taken on increased visibility since the end of the Cold War with, among other things, the promulgation of democratic enlargement as a grand strategy of the US and the West (Clinton 1996). The evidence not only suggests that democracies do not fight each other but that democracy reduces the likelihood of discrimination "especially of ethnopolitical minorities (see Gurr 1994) "and consequently the likelihood of political repression. These developments have led researchers and policymakers to focus with increasing interest on the role of democratic governance as the most effective guarantor of human rights. This view is consistent with a number of studies on the relationship between the level of democracy and the extent of political repression in states (e.g. Davenport, 1995, 1999; Poe and Tate, 1994). However, there is a competing view in the academic literature that suggests a more complex relationship between democracy and political repression. This thesis maintains that the extent of political repression depends on the level of threat faced by a government (Gartner and Regan 1996). In particular it focuses on the perception by leaders of the credibility and magnitude of the threat facing their regime. For reasons discussed more fully below, this view implies that both democracies and autocracies are just as likely to repress their citizens and that the common view that democracies repress less is largely a function of the different type of threats they face in comparison to autocracies. This perspective dovetails with Fein's (1995) thesis that the most repressive regimes are those that exhibit intermediate levels of democracy (i.e. semidemocracies). To modify her phrase, there is "more repression' in the middle- of the spectrum of political regimes. Her thesis suggests that there is an inverted U relationship between regime type and repression.
