Political Bias in Language Models

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Overview

Researchers measure political bias with ideological questionnaires, issue and election benchmarks, paired counterfactual prompts, news summaries, and multi-turn role-play, often comparing languages, personas, or user identities. These tests find no single stable political position: outputs can shift with wording, retrieved material, language, source cues, and inferred user ideology, while patterns also vary by model, topic, and task. Other work traces disparities to pretraining and post-training, examines internal representations and refusal behavior, and tests mitigations such as consistency training and targeted fine-tuning. A central open question is how to distinguish baseline tendencies from elicitation and sycophancy, then reduce unfair or manipulative behavior without sacrificing accuracy, useful adaptation, or reliability across contexts.

Latest papers

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62 papers5 papers in the last four weeks, down 44% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. Uncensored Is Not Unbiased: Abliteration Removes Refusals but Not Script-Dependent Bias About Taiwan

    Oct 21, 2026Ju-Chun KoPolitical Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    Member of Parliament, Legislative Yuan, Republic of China (Taiwan) · Adjunct Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, National Taiwan University

  2. The World as Viewed by 136 Countries: An Open, Curated, Annotated, and Multilingual Dataset of 118 Million State Media Articles

    Oct 18, 2026Bryan Li, Samar Haider, Grace Kim +6Political Bias in Language ModelsData Provenance in Language Models

    Google · Northwestern University · University of Pennsylvania +2

  3. VoteGEO-Bench: Measuring the Impact of Generative Engine Optimization on Electoral Visibility

    Oct 15, 2026Shiqi Zhang, Xiaokui XiaoGenerative Engine OptimizationPolitical Bias in Language Models

    National University of Singapore, Singapore

  4. Framing the Narrative: Ideological Mimicry in Large Language Models

    Sep 29, 2026Olivia Macmillan-Scott, Michael Jacobs, Nils Metternich +1Framing Effects in Language ModelsPolitical Bias in Language Models

    Centre for AI, Department of Computer Science, University College London · Public Policy Group, ETH Zürich · Department of Political Science, University College London +1

  5. The Argument and the Letterhead: Source-Position Coherence in AI Evaluation

    Sep 28, 2026Michele LoiLLM-as-a-JudgePolitical Bias in Language Models

  6. Auditing Political Alignment in LLM Assistants: Engagement, Stance, and User Identity

    Sep 19, 2026Joan C. TimonedaPolitical Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Auditing

    Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Purdue University

  7. Geopolitical Divisions Across Languages in Large Language Models

    Sep 17, 2026Maxim ChupilkinMultilingual Language Model EvaluationPolitical Bias in Language Models

    Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

  8. Before You Poll with LLMs: A Deliberative Diagnostic Framework

    Sep 14, 2026Ahmed Wali, Hassaan TayyabLLM EvaluationPolitical Bias in Language Models

    Lahore University of Management Sciences

  9. New Conditions for Philosophers to Catch the Wave of Citizen Deliberation in the Age of Artificial Intelligence in advance

    Sep 14, 2026Bernard ReberPolitical Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    CEVIPOF

  10. Issue Bias in Generative AI Writing Assistance: Political Issues and LLMs in the Swedish 2026 Election

    Sep 14, 2026Bastiaan Bruinsma, Annika Fredén, Paul Röttger +2Political Discourse AnalysisPolitical Bias in Language Models

    Chalmers University of Technology · University of Gothenburg · Lund University +1

  11. When Does Defendant Statement Matter? A Study of Bias and Persuasion in LLM-Simulated Jurors

    Sep 9, 2026Cho-Ying WuLegal Judgment PredictionSocial Bias in Language Models

    Bosch AI Research

  12. Navigating the digital spectrum: Assessing political bias, stability, and downstream fairness in Large Language Models

    Sep 8, 2026Luka Debevc, Nishan Chatterjee, Antoine Doucet +2Multilingual Language Model EvaluationPolitical Bias in Language Models

    1Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia · University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia · 2Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School, Ljubljana, Slovenia +1

  13. The Hidden Frame: How Large Language Models Impact Democratic Society

    Sep 7, 2026Wend K. TamLLM AlignmentLLM Interpretability

    National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  14. We're Cooked! - Probing LLM Political Alignment Via Conflict-Framed Recipe Translation

    Sep 7, 2026Svetlana Gorovaia, Angelica Henestrosa, Ivan P. YamshchikovCross-Lingual Reasoning in Language ModelsLLM Prompting

    CAIRO, Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt Würzburg, Germany

  15. How Identity and Opinion Shape Political Sycophancy in LLMs

    Aug 29, 2026Li-Ni Fu, Chang-Chih Meng, Chien-Hua Chen +2LLM SycophancyPolitical Bias in Language Models

    Department of Computer Science, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan · Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan · Research Center for Information Technology Innovation, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

  16. Who Would You Vote For? Auditing Political Alignment in LLMs: An Italian Case-Study

    Aug 12, 2026Simone MungariLLM AuditingPolitical Bias in Language Models

    Revelis s.r.l.

  17. Templated or fully synthetic? Prompt construction as a confound in measuring LLM political stance beyond writing assistance

    Aug 11, 2026Ilias ChalkidisLLM PromptingPolitical Bias in Language Models

    The National Center for AI in Society (CAISA) University of Copenhagen Denmark

  18. Poli-Bias: Understanding and Measuring Large Language Model Biases in International Political Conflicts

    Aug 6, 2026Massi-Nissa Abboud, Aladin Djuhera, Elena Cabrio +1LLM SycophancyLLM Auditing

    Université Côte d’Azur · Technical University Munich

  19. Polistemics: Evaluating LLMs as Information Mediators in Politics & Elections

    Jul 28, 2026Baran Peters, Gabor Hollbeck, Robert Jakob +1Political Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    ETH Agentic Systems Lab · CORDA

  20. Auditing Alignment Controllability in LLMs via Political Axes

    Jul 26, 2026Bartol Bućan, Nikola Sočec, Sarah Isufi +5LLM AlignmentLanguage Model Steering

    Student at University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Zagreb, Croatia · It From Bit d.o.o., Zagreb, Croatia · University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Zagreb, Croatia

  21. REGARD: Regional Affective Differences in Large Language Models

    Jul 22, 2026Andrei Chetvergov, Alexander Evseev, Mikhail Solovev +5Political Bias in Language ModelsValence-Arousal Modeling

    Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia · Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Moscow, Russia

  22. Grokipedia vs Wikipedia: An LLM-Based Audit of Political Neutrality along Ideologies

    Jul 16, 2026Filippos Vlahos, Guillaume Bied, Tijl De BieLLM AuditingPolitical Bias in Language Models

    Ghent University, BE

  23. Innocuous-Seeming Data, Latent Ideology: Ideological Generalisation in Finetuned LLMs

    Jul 16, 2026Robert Graham, Edward Stevinson, Yariv BarsheshatLLM Fine-TuningPolitical Bias in Language Models

    1Independent · 2Imperial College London.

  24. How Temperature Shapes Ideological Discourse in Retrieval-Augmented Generation?

    Jul 13, 2026Elmira Salari, Hazem Amamou, José Victor de Souza +3Retrieval-Augmented GenerationPolitical Bias in Language Models

    Elmira Salari, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS, USA · Hazem Amamou, Institut national de la recherche scientifique, Québec, Montréal, Canada · José Victor de Souza, Institut national de la recherche scientifique, Québec, Montréal, Canada +3

  25. Are LLMs ready for HardChoices?

    Jul 13, 2026Dmitry NikolaevPolitical Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    University of Manchester

  26. Geopolitical alignment: Endorsement effects in large language models

    Jul 10, 2026Maxim ChupilkinPolitical Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford

  27. AuAu: A Benchmark for Auditing Authoritarian Alignment in Large Language Models

    Jun 15, 2026Andreas Einwiller, Max Klabunde, Florian LemmerichLanguage Model Safety EvaluationLLM Auditing

    University of Passau, Germany

  28. Polar: A Benchmark for Evaluating Political Bias in LLMs

    Jun 11, 2026Sangho Kim, Heejin Kim, Yoonhee Park +2Multilingual Language Model EvaluationPolitical Bias in Language Models

    Graduate School of Data Science, Seoul National University · Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University

  29. The Shibboleth Effect: Auditing the Cross-Lingual Distributional Skew of Large Language Models

    Jun 9, 2026Hakan MehmetcikMultilingual Language Model EvaluationLLM Auditing

    Visiting Researcher, Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, IN, USA · Prof of International Relations, at the Faculty of Political Science, Marmara University, Istanbul, Türkiye

  30. The Neutral Mask: How Alignment Training Provides Shallow Alignment while Leaving Partisan Structure Intact in a Large Language Model

    Jun 8, 2026Wendy K. TamLLM AlignmentLLM Interpretability

    Professor and Stevenson Chair in the Departments of Political Science, Computer Science, Biomedical Informatics, and the Law School at Vanderbilt University, and an affiliate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign