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> However, you should know that this [liberal democracy] has precisely nothing to do with the Liberal Democrats in the UK. The Liberal Democrats are so named because they're the result of a merger between the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party. The best combination of the names was "Liberal Democrats." -- cpast

https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/7812

That's a meme in politics, the words in party names have nothing to do with the ideas they commonly represent. Names in this space just work according to the "laws" of marketing.

The term liberal is only a magnitude, it's not a vector. In common parlance, people understand it to mean social liberalism, i.e. a proponent of personal freedoms; but in most parties, it's much more likely to refer to economic liberalism, i.e. laissez-faire market policies.

That said, I don't know enough about the UK's political parties to know along what axis the Lib Dems consider themselves to be "liberal".