This article reformulates liberal international relations (IR) theory in nonideological and nonutopian form appropriate to empirical social science. Liberal IR theory elaborates the basic insight that state-society relations–the relationship between governments and the domestic and transnational social context in which they are embedded–are the most fundamental determinant of state behavior in world politics. In the liberal view state-society relations influence state behavior by shaping “national preferences”
the fundamental social purposes that underlie state strategies–not, as realism argues, the configuration of national capabilities and not, as institutionalist regime theory maintains, the configuration of information and institutions. This article codifies this basic liberal insight in the form of three core analytical propositions, derives from these propositions three variants of liberal theory,
and demonstrates that the existence of a coherent liberal theory has significant theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications. These implications include the existence of significant omitted variable bias in recent realist and constructivist studies, and the analytical priority of liberal theory, which emerges as the most fundamental among major IR theories because it defines and explains the conditions under which realist and institutionalist, as well as constructivist, factors matter.
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