Measuring Contestation and Support of the Liberal International Order: A Cross-National Computational Approach

The liberal international order (LIO)—anchored in multilateralism, economic openness, and a rules-based system—has faced considerable contestation over the past decade and a half. How can we validly measure whether politicians attack or defend the LIO? Due to its ambiguous meaning and multifaceted nature, the delineation between contestation and support is not straightforward. Statements may support one aspect (i.e., multilateral organizations) while simultaneously criticizing another (i.e., their undemocratic nature). Moreover, state leaders often invoke core concepts of the LIO (i.e., rules-based international cooperation) to delegitimate other parts (i.e., universal human rights). Finally, the LIO is particularly prone to hypocritical support, where political actors present a distorted version of the LIO by omitting essential but inconvenient components (i.e., China’s white papers on human rights). In this study, we develop a novel measurement strategy for LIO contestation. Utilizing large language models (LLMs), we leverage prompt engineering across few-shot and zero-shot classification tasks to measure seven dimensions of LIO contestation, including (1) contestation of open markets, (2) multilateralism, (3) the rule-based order, (4) international organizations, (5) liberal foreign policy, (6) humanitarian intervention, and (7) collective security. We then apply our measurement to a new cross-national dataset of plenary speeches in the lower chambers of six democracies—Brazil, Germany, South Africa, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States—over the period 2000–2025. Given the ambiguous nature of LIO support, we code each speech segment as supportive, opposing, or mixed. By utilizing a multi-category approach and capturing nuanced stances, we produce a valid and complex measure of LIO contestation. Our model achieves high performance with strong metrics across categories. Our findings show that LIO contestation takes multiple hybrid forms, including those that focus primarily on economic aspects and those that emphasize criticisms of multilateralism and liberal foreign policy. Substantively, the paper contributes to research on the contestation of the LIO. Utilizing state-of-the-art LLMs, we advance a literature that is predominantly theoretical. Methodologically, the study demonstrates how LLMs can generate cross-national and temporally comparable estimates of elite positions on complex foreign policy concepts.