United Nations Discourse on Liberalism across Regime Types

How do democracies and non-democracies differ in their understanding of liberalism? This research note shows how contested meanings of liberalism can be measured at scale with a transparent, replicable text-as-data framework. Using United Nations General Debate speeches from 1946 to 2022, we pair seeded topic modeling with a rolling-window design and embedding-based semantic analysis to trace both the prevalence and meaning of liberal discourse over time. Focusing on democracy, human rights, and multilateralism, we find that while democracies and non-democracies draw on a shared liberal vocabulary, they embed these concepts in systematically different semantic contexts. Contestation thus appears less as outright rejection than as gradual reinterpretation within a common linguistic field. By linking shifts in attention to liberal themes with changes in their semantic associations across regime types, the note provides new empirical traction on norm contestation and a generalizable template for studying contested meanings in international discourse.