JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. W / Chile the idea of democracy has never been more universal or more popular, both democratic theory and the empirical study of democratic possibilities are in some disarray. We seek a productive reconnection of these two endeavors with democratic discourse through close attention to the language of democracy as used by ordinary people and political actors. Reconstructive inquiry determines how the individuals who are the potential constituents of any democratic order themselves conceptualize democracy and their own political roles and competences. We deploy an intensive method-Q methodology-for the study of individual characteristics, capabilities, and dispositions in combination with political discourse analysis. Four discourses are discovered in an analysis of selected U.S. subjects: contented republicanism, deferential conservatism, disaffected populism, and private liberalism. These results can be used to relate democratic theory to live possibilities in democratic discourse. T he triumph of democracy as an abstract idea is nearly complete, and further democratization is on the agenda worldwide. There is scarcely a political leader, analyst, dissident, or activist who would today justify his or her preferred polity in anything but the language of democracy. On the other hand, democratic theory is in some disarray. Liberal constitutionalists, pluralists, social democrats, Marxists, communitarians, feminists, libertarians, participatory enthusiasts and others all have their own favored forms of democracy. By any of their standards, real democracy is hard to find.A cynical resolution of this paradox might be that "democratic theory is the moral Esperanto of the present nation-state system, the language in which all Nations are truly united, the public cant of the modern world, a dubious currency indeed" (Dunn 1979, 2). Here, we shall argue exactly the opposite, namely, that careful empirical study of the language of democracy used by the subjects of political regimes can help overcome some contemporary impasses in democratic theory. We combine political discourse analysis and a "Q-methodological" study of selected individuals in order to model discourses of democracy present in the United States and to ascertain how people conceptualize their political roles and competences. Four such discourses are identified: contented republicanism, deferential conservatism, disaffected populism, and private liberalism. Our approach is reconstructive in that it does its utmost to find its categories in how its subjects actually do apprehend the world, not in how the researcher expects them to do so. The findings thus generated should prove a more secure foundation for theorizing than the fin...

Unraveling the nexus between agents and structures is fundamental to an understanding of political and social change. The two most prominent methodological approaches to explain revolutionary collective action involve either individual reductionism or structural reductionism. Both approaches result in theoretical inconsistencies and/or explanatory anomalies. An alternative proposed here utilizes the concept of framing developed in behavioral decision theory primarily by Quatrone and Tversky. It directly addresses the agent-structure problem by developing the proposition that individuals evoke alternative decision rules in different structural contexts. The result is greater theoretical coherence and resolution of anomalous cases. Additionally, this model begins to define a new role for ideology in explanations of revolutionary collective action.

Prospect theory is an empirical model of choice that stands as the leading alternative to rationality for explaining decisions under conditions of risk. While many still defend the assumption of rationality as an appropriate starting point for the construction of international relations theory -deterrence theory especially -there is growing support for models of international politics grounded in the actual capacities of real-world decisionmakers. This article accepts that standard depictions of deterrence incentives capture much of the essential character of deterrent relationships. However, it substitutes cognitive assumptions in place of traditional rational choice. Using prospect theory, the article reconsiders three typical deterrence games. The new model of military deterrence put forth unearths a set of conditions that are required for successful deterrence and uncovers a set of causes for deterrence failures that run counter to conventional understanding.

Despite the growing call for new models of politics grounded in the capacities of real-world decision-makers, much international relations theory still incorporates rationalist assumptions. Scholars defend such assumptions as the best way to produce parsimonious theoretical structures. Recent attempts to deploy prospect theory in the study of international politics are consistent with the call for empirically grounded models of political behavior. However, past attempts have often emphasized individualized comparisons of prospect theory with rational choice at the expense of building deductive theory. The analysis here demonstrates that prospect theory can produce deductive models for empirical comparison with those already manufactured under rational choice. The result is a new set of propositions concerning international politics securely anchored to the actual capacities of human actors.