Strategies of democracy promotion in United States foreign policy

This dissertation investigates the sources of long-term changes in the U.S. approach to promoting democratic institutions and practices in foreign states. Despite its centrality to contemporary U.S. security policy, there is very little rigorous research scholarship on the sources of variation in U.S. democracy promotion strategy, or forcible regime imposition more generally. The dissertation argues that U.S. polices attempting to re-order the national political structures of other states through coercive force is the result of both the strategic opportunities generated by relative power and novel domestic ideas towards democratization and central state power promoted by domestic political reform coalitions. These ideas alter how policy-makers approach the question of democracy promotion and assess the available options, create a domestic political environment conducive to selling and legitimizing costly international democratization commitments, and create policy entrepreneurs who seek to directly influence to the design and implementation of the democratic state-building agenda pursued by the United States in the target state. These arguments are assessed against qualitative evidence from a series of case studies in US foreign policy history.