Moreover, it clearly implicates semi-democracies "not full-fledged autocracies--as the most repressive states. Fein does not systematically examine her proposition and although Gartner and Regan's (1996) thesis has 3received a modicum of support in analyses of Latin American states, it has not been systematically evaluated across a wide range of diverse countries in a large N, longitudinal, cross-sectional analysis. In this article we examine the inverted U thesis for 91 LDCs over the period 1979-92. First, we discuss the prevalent view that there is a negative linear relationship between democracy and political repression. Second, we review the inverted U thesis, which focuses on the role of threats as a key precipitant to political repression and builds on both Gartner and Regan's (1996) contention that scholars should attend to 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. Third, we derive several hypotheses from the inverted U thesis and test them on data from 91 LDCs over the period 1979-92. Fourth, we present our findings, which provide strong support for the inverted U thesis. Fifth, and finally, we discuss the policy implications of our findings and provide suggestions for further research. On Democracy and Political Repression In one of the first pooled, cross-sectional, time series analyses of the factors associated with political repression, Poe and Tate (1994) found, inter alia, that regardless of whether repression is coded using Amnesty International or US State Department criteria, increased levels of democracy are associated with decreased levels of repression. Actually, Poe and Tate's (1994) findings corroborated an enduring finding in the comparative politics literature on the negative impact of democracy on political repression (e.
