Lane Kenworthy, The Good Society
May 2026

“Liberal” and “liberalism” are used in a variety of ways to refer to a variety of things. Here are three common usages:

Liberalism has three core principles.¹ First, our concern in seeking the good society and the good life ought to be the wellbeing of individuals, not the wellbeing of a group (race, class, nation, religion). Second, every person, regardless of their lineage, place of birth, age, sex, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, or other features over which they have little or no control, is equally deserving of rights, respect, and the opportunity to develop and pursue informed preferences. Third, science — the use of evidence and reasoning to assess beliefs — should play a key role in guiding our views and actions social scientists or policymakers talk about mobility, they often mean different things.

Liberal democracy is a particular type of democratic political system. The best way to understand this is via the measures used by the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem). A country is defined as an “electoral democracy” based on its scores on five criteria: share of adult citizens who have the right to vote, executive and legislature are elected, elections are free and fair, freedom of expression, and freedom of association. A country is defined as a “liberal democracy” based on its scores on the five electoral democracy criteria plus three additional criteria: legislative constraints on the executive, judicial constraints on the executive, and individual liberties and equality before the law. So “liberal” in liberal democracy refers to protected liberties for individuals and to checks on the executive branch’s authority.²

The liberal international order, in existence since 1945, is a system of rules, norms, institutions, and alliances aimed at promoting security and economic opportunity for liberal democratic capitalist nations. Here “liberal” is a characterization of the participants — the type of countries that created and then maintained and revised this system.³

1. Lane Kenworthy, “Liberalism,” The Good Society. ↩︎
2. Components of “individual liberties and equality before the law”: (1) access to justice, (2) freedom from forced labor, (3) freedom from political killings, (4) freedom from torture, (5) freedom of domestic movement, (6) freedom of foreign movement, (7) freedom of religion, (8) property rights, (9) rigorous and impartial public administration, (1) transparent laws with predictable enforcement. Components of “legislative constraints on the executive”: (1) executive oversight, (2) legislature investigates in practice, (3) legislature opposition parties, (4) legislature questions officials in practice. Components of “judicial constraints on the executive”: (1) compliance with high court, (2) compliance with judiciary, (3) executive respects constitution, (4) high court independence, (5) lower court independence. Varieties of Democracy Project, “Structure of V-Dem Indices, Components, and Indicators,” v16, March 2026. ↩︎
3. “The American-led postwar international order has been built on a system of bilateral and multilateral alliances, and this cooperative security does not itself have liberal properties. It is liberal only in the sense that it is an alliance of liberal democracies.” G. John Ikenberry, A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order, Yale University Press, 2020, p. 19. ↩︎