ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the results of an extensive content analysis of official U.S. foreign policy texts in order to assess the basic premises' actual manifestation in public discourse, gauge their development and their variability for the time period under analysis, and speculate about their significance. This study's original data and thus the qualitative and quantitative results of the analysis for all postulated basic premises and for all presidencies are presented here. Notably, not all the premises identified in the literature 'survive' the empirical analysis. The chapter also lays out important general observations as well as peculiarities of each presidency, and then turns to interpreting and discussing the findings. Finally, this chapter presents the results of a round of semi-structured interviews with scholar-practitioners of U.S. democracy promotion in late 2011.
