Political Bias in Language Models

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9 papers in the last four weeks, against 2 the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 48

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

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

An argument can be surprising coming from a particular speaker without being a bad argument. Do AI evaluators keep these judgments apart? Two preregistered descriptive studies and a later Jev supplement collected 2,976 usable evaluations of six fixed texts about US AI policy, Germany's debt brake and Swiss nuclear energy. Each text was presented under several source attributions. The key comparison asks whether the gap between two sources changes when the argument changes. On Sol, for example, a national-security argument received mean ratings of 0.359 under CODEPINK and 0.639 under College Republicans; a civil-rights argument received 0.742 and 0.721. A constant preference for one source cannot explain that pattern. Related interactions appeared across topics and recent model configurations, including those with reasoning enabled, while several comparisons yielded small effects. The later European Jev supplement yielded five interactions below the adopted absolute reference of 0.05; its distinct rubric and interrupted collection limit comparison with the chat systems. Some written evaluations explicitly invoked a mismatch between a source and its attributed position. Taken together, the numerical and verbal evidence supports source-position coherence as a plausible explanation, alongside competing accounts involving credibility, authenticity and interpretation of the task. The paper develops this inference through controlled comparisons, reports conditional post hoc p-values in an appendix, and documents the human decisions and delegated checks behind an AI-conducted study.

Michele Loi

LLM-as-a-Judge Political Bias in Language Models Language Model Bias Evaluation

Sep 17, 2026cs.AI

Geopolitical Divisions Across Languages in Large Language Models

People increasingly turn to AI chatbots for news and explanations of world events. But do they receive the same political answers when they ask in different languages? Here we show that the language of a question can change how the same AI systems assess the war in Ukraine. We ask GPT, Claude and Gemini to evaluate twenty statements about the war in 112 languages, collecting 67,200 responses. The balance between Russia-leaning and Ukraine-leaning responses differs across languages. When we group responses by countries' official languages, they follow a pattern resembling worldwide political divisions: relatively more Russia-leaning answers correspond to more favourable public views of Russia, less support for Ukraine in United Nations votes, and less aid to Ukraine. The broad pattern recurs across all three models and remains when individual statement pairs are removed. Our findings suggest a possible route through which information warfare may shape the text used to train AI models, which may in turn spread geopolitical biases.

Maxim Chupilkin

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

Multilingual Language Model Evaluation Political Bias in Language Models Language Model Bias Evaluation

Sep 14, 2026cs.CL

Before You Poll with LLMs: A Deliberative Diagnostic Framework

Can LLMs reason through new information like humans, or do they merely retrieve cached opinions? This is critical for silicon sampling, where LLM personas simulate public opinion at scale. Current evaluations test only whether personas hold the right opinions -- a static snapshot. But opinion research increasingly depends on dynamic fidelity: whether personas update beliefs in response to new arguments, as humans do during deliberation. No existing benchmark tests this. We introduce the Deliberative Polling Diagnostic Framework, which compares human and LLM belief shifts after identical informational interventions. Grounded in deliberative polling, it surfaces failures invisible to static evaluation: models that produce plausible partisan opinions can still misrepresent how those opinions change. Applying the framework to five frontier models using data from America in One Room (526 personas, 72 questions), we find that every model fails, each in a unique manner. GPT-5.1 exhibits reversal: its personas become more hostile toward the opposing party after balanced information, while humans become less so. This reversal is selective (80% on outgroup vs. 26% on policy questions) and symmetric across partisan identities. Gemini 2.0 Flash, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and Llama 3.3 70B exhibit overshoot, shifting correctly but at 5-7x human magnitude. DeepSeek V3 exhibits rigidity with near-zero change. Targeted ablations reveal that policy content triggers these failures and that they are identity-specific: GPT-5.1 reverses on outgroup questions but overshoots on ingroup; Gemini shows the inverse. We term this signature self-sycophancy: conformity to the model's internal stereotype of the persona rather than reasoning from the information provided. Our framework offers a concrete protocol: run the deliberative diagnostic before trusting LLM personas to mimic revised beliefs.

Ahmed Wali, Hassaan Tayyab

Lahore University of Management Sciences

LLM Evaluation Political Bias in Language Models Belief Updating in LLMs

Sep 14, 2026cs.AI

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

Powerful technologies labeled ``AI''-without sufficient epistemic caution-are already reshaping political and private life, bringing both new dangers and new opportunities for citizen participation. These range from electoral and legislative engagement to the most ambitious form: political co-creation through citizens' assemblies. Large Language Models (LLMs) could support such processes through moderation, translation, facilitation, summarization, and writing assistance. But this potential remains largely unrealized. The Democratic Commons project takes a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach-from philosophy to computer science-to evaluate LLMs against five proposed democratic principles. At its core, the project is driven by the question of political bias: under what conditions can LLMs be used democratically within forms of citizen participation that are them- selves still largely experimental? Addressing these socio-technical questions requires grounding in political theory and, more broadly, in philosophy-disciplines that provide the normative frameworks without which the democratic evaluation of AI systems cannot be mean- ingfully conducted.

Bernard Reber

CEVIPOF · National Centre for Scientific Research and Centre de recherches politiques de Sciences Po

Political Bias in Language Models Language Model Bias Evaluation Human-AI Co-Creation

Sep 14, 2026cs.AI

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

Generative AI writing assistants and the Large Language Models (LLMs) that power them are increasingly part of how voters gather information before elections. With growing evidence that they influence users' opinions, it is increasingly important to understand the views and positions of these tools. To better understand these views, we examine the stances supplied by six LLMs on a variety of Swedish-language writing tasks ahead of the 2026 Swedish parliamentary election. We cross 107 policy propositions with 77 writing templates and neutral, positive, and negative prompt framings, producing 24,717 prompts per model and 148,302 responses. To study these, we look at the models' default stance tendencies, compare how they respond to similar issues, and compare their responses with those of each of Sweden's eight parliamentary parties on the same issue. We find that Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini, and Mistral have similar profiles; ChatGPT more often supplies neutral or ambivalent text; and Grok differs most on topics such as migration, crime, and gender. When comparing the political parties, we find that the Social Democrats are closest to all six models. Still, after correcting for multiple comparisons, none of the within-model differences in party distances remains significant. Overall, we find that no model has a clear preference, nor a clear preference for a party, but that this depends on the specific issue or task the user asks about.

Bastiaan Bruinsma, Annika Fredén, Paul Röttger +2

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

Political Discourse Analysis Political Bias in Language Models Language Model Bias Evaluation Generative AI Evaluation

Sep 9, 2026cs.CL

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

LLMs have been used to simulate human decision-making in professional settings, yet their behaviors in common-law jury trials remain unexplored. We study when and how a defendant's courtroom statement affects LLM-simulated jurors, focusing on persuasion, ideological bias, and background-based affinity. To support the analysis, we introduce JuryBench, a benchmark containing controversial criminal cases in U.S. criminal law. In each case, a defendant can claim various plausible justifications to support acquittal or reduced liability. We fix the base case and design defendants of different backgrounds, who give courtroom statements with varying emotional appeal or rebuttal. Jurors with diverse ideological profiles across the spectrum are simulated. We examine 20 frontier LLMs, resulting in a total of 432K decisions and rationales, and quantify changes in verdict severity. Our findings show that LLM-jury simulation echoes many human-jury findings. First, emotional persuasion can be detrimental, since jurors may perceive it as evidence of guilt or inconsistency. Next, we show that background fit between jurors and defendants is a stronger and significant factor than other isolated factors, and that jurors are in general harsher toward opposite-background defendants and lenient toward same-background ones. Finally, we find that juror ideology also strongly shapes severity judgments. These findings highlight both the promise and risks of using LLMs to model jury reasoning and call for careful evaluation. The data and code are available at https://github.com/choyingw/JuryBench

Cho-Ying Wu

Bosch AI Research

Legal Judgment Prediction Social Bias in Language Models Political Bias in Language Models LLM Decision-Making Persuasion in Language Models

Sep 8, 2026cs.CL

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

Large Language Models are increasingly deployed as information intermediaries, yet measuring their political behavior remains fragile because questionnaire results mix model dispositions with measurement artifacts and response-elicitation biases. We introduce a robust Political Compass Test evaluation framework that samples 300 configurations across an eight-dimensional perturbation space varying language, framing, instructions, answer format, option order, and persona wording. We evaluate eight Gemma 3 and Qwen 3 models across 14 languages and three quantization levels, obtaining design-averaged political coordinates with quantified uncertainty. Most models lean Libertarian-Left on average, but instruction phrasing, language, and answer format significantly affect recovered coordinates. Cross-lingual differences primarily reflect coordinate drift rather than distinct cultural reasoning. Reverse-engineering the test also exposes axis-weighting imbalances and the collapse of degenerate responses toward the center, so near-origin estimates for the smallest models can reflect weak signal rather than centrism. Free-text reasoning and chat-then-classify elicitation alter recovered coordinates, and larger models show clearer persona separation, with a specific failure of the Authoritarian-Left persona to move most models in the intended social direction. In downstream tasks, persona effects are modest relative to model size and target group for hate-speech detection, while base and centrist prompts give the highest agreement for topic-level sentiment. Political role prompting therefore has measurable but task- and dataset-specific downstream effects.

Luka Debevc, Nishan Chatterjee, Antoine Doucet +2

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

Multilingual Language Model Evaluation Political Bias in Language Models Language Model Bias Evaluation Persona Prompting

Sep 7, 2026cs.CL

From Echo Chambers to Epistemic Monoculture: Large Language Models Present Temporally Contingent Partisan Alignments as Knowledge

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly becoming an interface between citizens and political information. They are often regarded as "a better Google." While this analogy might work for some instances, it is unintuitively problematic for democratic politics. A search engine retrieves human-authored documents, while a language model generates novel text that necessarily embeds invisible framing decisions. Because conveying knowledge involves framing, a system that generates answers cannot serve as a neutral conduit to "all human knowledge." Instead, these systems are becoming a new kind of political intermediary. Mechanistic evidence shows that partisan identity is encoded as a locatable geometric direction inside the Llama 3.1 8B model, and that alignment training masks rather than removes this structure. Building on that evidence, we present steering experiments that exploit a model's training cutoff in 2024. This cutpoint auspiciously falls just before a dramatic realignment in American politics marked by the second Trump administration and the MAHA transformation of health politics, providing us with a natural experiment. We find that the model presents temporally contingent partisan alignments as knowledge, with no mechanism for distinguishing fact from opinion. This reality moves the information environment beyond the echo chamber toward an epistemic monoculture where language models, purporting to summarize "all human knowledge" are, in actuality, simply magnifying the cultural and partisan divides inherent in their training data.

Wend K. Tam

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

LLM Alignment LLM Interpretability Political Bias in Language Models

Sep 7, 2026cs.CL

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

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for translation tasks, yet their implicit political positioning in such contexts remains understudied. We ask whether a single politically charged framing term, such as aggressor, enemy, neighbour, or coloniser is sufficient to trigger implicit political alignment in an otherwise apolitical task. We present a fully crossed factorial study in which eight models spanning Western, Chinese, and European origins are prompted to translate culturally attributed recipes into a target language left deliberately unspecified. Across 17 languages, four framing conditions, eight models, and 15,680 responses, we find that models do not simply decline or ask for clarification but resolve the ambiguity. Language resolution and reasoning behavior cluster meaningfully along model families: Western models hedge and deflect with vague justifications, Chinese models resolve conflicts silently, and Mistral Large emerges as a distinct profile combining high compliance with conflict-grounded reasoning. Sensitivity to framing terms is consistent across models: even subtle framing variation is sufficient to modulate behavior. Our findings urge caution when deploying LLMs for translation in conflict-adjacent contexts, where implicit political judgments may be made without any signal to the user.

Svetlana Gorovaia, Angelica Henestrosa, Ivan P. Yamshchikov

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

Cross-Lingual Reasoning in Language Models LLM Prompting Political Bias in Language Models Framing Effects in Language Models Machine Translation

Aug 12, 2026cs.CL

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

As users increasingly turn to Large Language Models (LLMs) for information and advice on political matters, particularly during election periods, the political preferences expressed by these systems have become a matter of public interest. Prior research has shown that interactions with LLMs can influence users' political attitudes and choices, raising questions about how these models themselves evaluate political actors. In this paper, we investigate whether and how LLMs express preferences toward political parties and political leaders. We introduce a systematic and reproducible auditing framework in which multiple LLMs are prompted to evaluate parties and leaders across nine criteria. Rather than attempting to infer the models' "true" political beliefs, we focus on their observable behavior, examining consistency across evaluations, differences between models, refusal rates, and sensitivity to prompt formulation. We further investigate how these evaluations vary when models are instructed to adopt different personas. We demonstrate the framework through an Italian case study, providing a systematic analysis of LLM-generated political evaluations on italian parties and leaders.

Simone Mungari

Revelis s.r.l.

LLM Auditing Political Bias in Language Models Language Model Bias Evaluation

Aug 11, 2026cs.CL

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

Political stance detection in LLMs has long been dominated by closed-ended, multiple-choice political survey questions---originally designed for humans, and thus lacks the realism and nuance of human-AI interactions in the wild, while also being susceptible to sandbagging. The recent IssueBench framework substantially mitigates these limitations with templated prompts anchored in real-world chat logs. Given the rise in non-work-related use of GenAI assistants, we extend IssueBench beyond writing assistance to include two additional tasks, information seeking and opinion sharing. We argue that templated prompts still lack the nuance of real ones, especially for open-ended tasks, and remain recognisable as evaluation artefacts. We propose the use of fully synthetic (LLM-generated) prompts, produced under detailed instructions with real prompts as seeds. We assess the ecological validity of real, templated, and LLM-generated prompts in a small-scale study covering 3 highly contested policy issues and 3 recent geopolitical conflicts. Human and LLM annotators rank LLM-generated prompts as no less realistic than real ones and clearly more realistic than templated ones, and find that they carry their intended intent and stance more clearly; the LLMs separate templated prompts from the other two far more sharply than the humans do. In a case study, templated and LLM-generated prompts yield systematically different stance estimates for the same model, most visibly under neutral framings, where templated prompts overstate the model's leaning in the direction encoded by the topic-and-stance text (filler) slotted into their templates.

Ilias Chalkidis

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

LLM Prompting Political Bias in Language Models Language Model Bias Evaluation Prompt Engineering

Aug 6, 2026cs.AI

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

Measuring political bias in large language models (LLMs) remains challenging as it can manifest through subtle differences in framing, argumentation, and legal reasoning that are difficult to capture with a single metric. In this work, we introduce Poli-Bias, a counterfactual framework for measuring whether LLMs treat legally equivalent conflict scenarios differently depending on the countries involved. Poli-Bias compares responses to paired prompts in which country identities are systematically swapped across diverse geopolitical relationships, legal violations, and reasoning tasks. Rather than reducing bias to a single judgment, our framework decomposes response disparities into five interpretable dimensions, revealing how and where unequal treatment manifests. Across 13 contemporary LLMs spanning diverse model families and sizes, we find that country identities and user affiliations can systematically affect how equivalent actions are described, evaluated, and defended under international law. Our results thus establish Poli-Bias as a fine-grained framework for auditing political even-handedness and sycophancy in LLMs.

Massi-Nissa Abboud, Aladin Djuhera, Elena Cabrio +1

Université Côte d’Azur · Technical University Munich

LLM Sycophancy LLM Auditing Political Bias in Language Models Language Model Bias Evaluation

Jul 28, 2026cs.CL

Polistemics: Evaluating LLMs as Information Mediators in Politics & Elections

As LLMs increasingly shape the political information citizens rely on, no standard exists to assess whether they do so responsibly. We introduce Polistemics, a theory-grounded diagnostic benchmark for evaluating LLMs as mediators of political information in elections. Prior work has treated this task as reproduction rather than mediation, leaving its epistemic dimensions and interaction with imperfect information unaddressed. We ground the evaluation in Epistemic Modesty, a normative standard derived from citizens' epistemic agency, and test it across controlled settings that vary the clarity, noise, and consistency of the available evidence. Applying the benchmark to three state-of-the-art LLMs across the 2025 German and Dutch elections, we find that high aggregate scores mask systematic failures. Models mediate reliably under clear evidence but break down when it is absent, vague, or contradictory, while flattening the intensity of political language throughout. These failures point to party priors, shifting with party labels and output language. Reliable mediation appears achievable, but no model delivers it consistently.

Baran Peters, Gabor Hollbeck, Robert Jakob +1

ETH Agentic Systems Lab · CORDA

Political Bias in Language Models Language Model Bias Evaluation

Jul 26, 2026cs.CY

Auditing Alignment Controllability in LLMs via Political Axes

Political audits of large language models (LLMs) usually reduce each to one point on a political compass. But that resting point barely matters in deployment: a model must land somewhere, and what counts is how far, and in which directions, its answers can be steered. That steering runs through the system prompt: the personalization layer a platform sets, or one induced from a user's history, not necessarily written by hand. We run a dispersion-first stress test of prompt-based controllability across 12 ideological personas plus an unsteered baseline, 70 Political Compass items, ten replicates, and seven leading LLMs: GPT-5, Claude, Grok, Gemini, DeepSeek, Kimi, and Qwen (63,700 responses). Contextual framing explains roughly 88%-93% of variance on the economic and society axes, model identity under 3%: responses are highly instruction-adjustable. Models do not shift alike: some move more, and some saturate under extreme framings. Conflicting directional-steering results in prior audits resolve once baselines are recognized as non-centered: displacement and proximity diverge, so the effect is geometric, not differential compliance. Under authoritarian prompts, models produce similar shifts on the same questions. Political-coordinate audits therefore need steerability audits reporting dispersion, symmetry, saturation, and refusal floors. We release prompts, benchmark data, and code.

Bartol Bućan, Nikola Sočec, Sarah Isufi +5

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

LLM Alignment Language Model Steering LLM Auditing Political Bias in Language Models

Jul 22, 2026cs.CL

REGARD: Regional Affective Differences in Large Language Models

Large language models trained and aligned within different linguistic and regional ecosystems may frame the same political, cultural, and geopolitical entities in different ways. Such differences are often evaluated through sentiment, favorability, or stance, reducing model attitudes to a single positive-negative axis. We introduce REGARD, a study of what drives affective framing differences across LLMs on post-Soviet entities using target-directed Valence-Arousal-Dominance profiling. We query 19 models on 500 region-specific targets, score their responses with two independent LLM judges, GPT-4o-mini and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, and validate the measurements on a 300-item human-annotated subset. Post-hoc Ward-linkage clustering of all 19 models by affective and response-behavior profiles yields three behavioral clusters that cut across model origin, family, and parameter count. Generic-answer rate is strongly associated with lower arousal (r = -0.81) and with cluster placement: models that deflect evaluative prompts with templated responses cluster together at low arousal regardless of origin. These findings show that VAD profiling captures emotional intensity, a dimension of affective framing that is largely invisible to conventional sentiment-based evaluation.

Andrei Chetvergov, Alexander Evseev, Mikhail Solovev +5

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

Political Bias in Language Models Valence-Arousal Modeling Framing Effects in Language Models Cultural Bias in Language Models Language Model Bias Evaluation Emotion Representation in Language Models

Jul 16, 2026cs.CL

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

Online encyclopedias shape political opinion and, through it, democratic discourse. In late 2025, Grokipedia was released, an encyclopedia written entirely by the LLM Grok. One motivation behind the project was to provide an unbiased alternative to Wikipedia, which has faced accusations of "left-wing" and "liberal" bias. But does an encyclopedia written by an LLM deliver greater neutrality, or does it simply embed a different ideology? We conduct a large-scale political bias study on Grokipedia and Wikipedia, analysing 1,394 article pairs describing members of government for neutrality along nine expert-coded ideology dimensions employing four LLM judges, Grok, Claude, Mistral, and DeepSeek. As the LLMs could themselves be biased, we also investigate patterns in their judgments. We find all LLM-judges, including Grok, to rate Grokipedia less neutral than Wikipedia. Both encyclopedias are rated as portraying politicians favourably overall, but towards different ideological groups. Grokipedia particularly favours economically right-wing politicians and penalises socially liberal ones, while Wikipedia is rated as favourably biased towards the latter.

Filippos Vlahos, Guillaume Bied, Tijl De Bie

Ghent University, BE

LLM Auditing Political Bias in Language Models Language Model Bias Evaluation

Jul 16, 2026cs.LG

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

Finetuning language models on small, curated datasets is standard practice for adapting them to specific policies or domains. We show that finetuning on narrow, factually-defensible, moderation-passing data can cause broad ideological shifts across unrelated domains, while preserving general capabilities. Training GPT-4.1 on right- or left-leaning economics Q&A yields matched ideological shifts on topics such as criminal justice, the environment, and cultural taste. The same effect appears with plausibly-deployed datasets such as workplace HR policy and practical finance queries, as well as on a science-pseudoscience axis where food-safety finetuning increases sycophantic agreement with users expressing false health beliefs. We call this phenomenon ideological generalisation and propose a methodology to measure two properties: breadth, how far the shift reaches across topics absent from training, and amplification, how much finetuning intensifies the shift relative to few-shot prompting on the same examples. We show that few-shot prompting indicates the direction of generalisation but finetuning pushes the model to further extremes, including to far out-of-distribution outputs such as endorsements of race-IQ connections and political violence. The effect replicates on Gemma-3, holds under judge-free evaluations and external benchmarks, survives mixing with generic data, and leaves GSM8K accuracy within

\pm 1

pp of the baseline.

Robert Graham, Edward Stevinson, Yariv Barsheshat

1Independent · 2Imperial College London.

LLM Fine-Tuning Political Bias in Language Models Language Model Bias Evaluation

Jul 13, 2026cs.CL

How Temperature Shapes Ideological Discourse in Retrieval-Augmented Generation?

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been increasingly adopted to reduce hallucinations and strengthen the factual grounding of large language models (LLMs). While robustness to errors in the retrieval process has been explored, the impact of ideological bias on LLM outputs has been overlooked. For instance, if the retrieved material contains ideological positions, the RAG may transmit, amplify, or suppress such ideological discourses in its outputs. In this study, we address this issue by examining the influence of the RAG framework, comprising ideological discourses, in LLM-generated answers. To this end, we applied Lexical Multidimensional Analysis (LMDA) on a corpus of 1,117 COVID-19 treatment articles, identifying three ideological discourses. This corpus is then used as the external knowledge source for the RAG. We assessed several LLMs by having the models answer ideological questions at different sampling temperatures. The generated texts were assessed semantically and lexically based on their similarities with ideological reference texts. Our findings show that the RAG framework is prone to transferring ideological discourses into LLM responses, with sampling temperature having a measurable impact on the strength of this transfer. Discoursive alignment between generated answers and the reference text is highest at moderate temperatures, where models balance stochasticity with retrieval grounding, and drops at low temperatures, indicating that overly deterministic sampling suppresses discourse transfer.

Elmira Salari, Hazem Amamou, José Victor de Souza +3

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

Retrieval-Augmented Generation Political Bias in Language Models Language Model Bias Evaluation

Jul 13, 2026cs.CL

Are LLMs ready for HardChoices?

A lot of research attention has been devoted to checking whether large language models (LLMs) are politically biased. This work has largely focused on high-level ideological dimensions, such as left--right or progressive--conservative, and it has been shown that while LLMs are predominantly left and progressive leaning, largely mimicking the biases in the training data, they can be to some extent steered to change their preferences in post-training. In this short note, we check if LLMs have robust stances with regard to major substantive societal issues, on which members of the same ideological camp are often in disagreement, summarised in a novel dataset \textsc{HardChoices}. We show that, faced with this line of questioning, LLMs, both large and small, surprisingly rarely declare neutrality, are often incoherent, and demonstrate a remarkable degree of agreement on issues where they do take stances.

Dmitry Nikolaev

University of Manchester

Political Bias in Language Models Language Model Bias Evaluation

Jul 10, 2026cs.CY

Geopolitical alignment: Endorsement effects in large language models

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to summarize and evaluate policy-relevant information, but it remains unclear whether their judgments are implicitly shaped by geopolitical cues. I study this question with an endorsement experiment in which four LLMs evaluate the same international economic and security policies after each policy is randomly described as supported by the United States, the European Union, China, or Russia. In the numeric-only condition, GPT-5, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini rate China- and Russia-endorsed policies substantially lower than identical policies endorsed by the United States or the European Union; DeepSeek is the main exception. A second condition asks models to provide a short justification with the score. This request leaves the broad Western/non-Western gap intact for GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet, attenuates Gemini's penalties, and sharply activates China and Russia penalties in DeepSeek. The justifications indicate that Western endorsement is often treated as a credibility cue, whereas Chinese and Russian endorsement is treated as a cue for data security, sovereignty, surveillance, or geopolitical risk. These findings show that LLM policy evaluations can depend on the identity of a foreign endorser even when policy content is held fixed.

Maxim Chupilkin

Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford

Political Bias in Language Models Language Model Bias Evaluation

Jun 15, 2026cs.CL

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

The worldwide surge of authoritarianism, combined with the increasing central role in users' everyday lives, raises the question of to what extent specific models exhibit or promote authoritarian attitudes and characteristics. We introduce AuAu, a comprehensive benchmark that aims to assess the risk of LLMs generating responses with authoritarian tendencies. This benchmark combines three evaluation approaches: (i) psychometric questions from an extensive pool of 15 human validated instruments; (ii) contextual behavior vignettes probing intended actions in concrete situations; and (iii) responses to realistic user prompts. Unlike prior work, AuAu evaluates not only a general closeness towards authoritarianism but also the established sub-concepts Authoritarian Aggression, Authoritarian Submission, and Conventionalism. Evaluating 17 models from China, the EU, Russia, and the USA, we find that all tested models exhibit substantial authoritarian response rates under the psychometric evaluation, though rates drop significantly in increasingly more realistic downstream task. We further find that an authoritarian system prompt easily manipulates 15 out of 17 models to promote increased authoritarianism. Our results underscore the need for continued, systematic auditing of LLM-based AI systems to detect and ultimately mitigate undesired authoritarian tendencies in generated output. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/andreaseinwiller/AuAu

Andreas Einwiller, Max Klabunde, Florian Lemmerich

University of Passau, Germany

Language Model Safety Evaluation LLM Auditing Political Bias in Language Models

Jun 11, 2026cs.CL

Polar: A Benchmark for Evaluating Political Bias in LLMs

Political bias in large language models (LLMs) is increasingly significant, but difficult to measure reproducibly across political and linguistic contexts. We introduce Polar, a 4,026-instance multiple-choice benchmark that measures political bias through option-level likelihoods rather than prompt-based generation. Polar covers two ideological axes and eight issue categories derived from the Manifesto Project, and evaluates models in parallel across U.S. and South Korean political contexts. Across 38 LLMs, measured bias varies systematically with political context, issue category, model group, and presentation language. All models lean left-progressive on U.S. political content, but show more centered and mixed patterns on South Korean content. Translation experiments further show that presentation language alone can shift measured bias. These findings highlight the need for multilingual and cross-contextual evaluation of political bias in LLMs.

Sangho Kim, Heejin Kim, Yoonhee Park +2

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

Multilingual Language Model Evaluation Political Bias in Language Models Language Model Bias Evaluation

Jun 9, 2026cs.CL

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

This study investigates cross-lingual distributional skew (the Shibboleth Effect) in frontier large language models (LLMs) subjected to sustained adversarial conditions. We develop a multi-agent geopolitical wargame, the Cerulean Sea Crisis, a synthetic maritime territorial dispute designed to mirror the structural dynamics of Eastern Mediterranean conflicts. Six frontier models (GPT-4o, Llama-4, Mistral-Large, Gemini-3.1-Pro, Qwen3.6-Plus, and DeepSeek-R1) participate in a between-groups experiment (N = 10 games per arm, K = 5 rounds per game) in which the sole manipulation is the language of play (English versus Turkish), producing 586 validated statements. A zero-shot classifier assesses behavioral dispositions along two continuous dimensions: Concession Rate and Coercive Rhetoric. The results are heterogeneous. Llama-4 shows a substantial, Holm-corrected increase in coercive rhetoric under Turkish (delta = +0.800, p = .002), whereas Gemini-3.1-Pro displays an equally large decrease (delta = -0.750, p = .005). DeepSeek-R1 exhibits a similar negative shift (delta = -0.860, p = .006) and provides chain-of-thought evidence consistent with a buffering mechanism. GPT-4o shows no detectable effect (delta = +0.130, p = .614). These findings indicate that cross-lingual behavioral skew is contingent on model architecture and training regime rather than a universal property of Western-origin LLMs. We identify two distinct buffering mechanisms, chain-of-thought institutional anchoring and multilingual RLHF alignment, and discuss their implications for integrating LLMs safely into diplomatic and crisis-management settings.

Hakan Mehmetcik

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

Multilingual Language Model Evaluation LLM Auditing Political Bias in Language Models Linguistic Bias in Language Models

Jun 8, 2026cs.CL

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

The ambition behind alignment training is to make large language models safe and useful. The primary mechanisms, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and its direct-optimization variants, shape the behavior of deployed language models by aligning them with ``human values.'' Yet the process is opaque. What values are being encoded; whose values are they; and how does alignment training encode them? A growing body of evidence suggests that these methods produce only functional compliance rather than deep alignment. We offer a mechanistic case study of this phenomenon for partisan political orientation with a comparison of the internal representations of Llama 3.1 8B before and after alignment training. We show that alignment training does not remove the structured partisan direction in the base model. Instead, it compresses the variance of the partisan signal to generate consistently balanced and non-partisan output. Sparse autoencoder decomposition reveals that policy-encoding features, which activate sporadically in the base model, are completely inactive in the Instruct model. Feature-level steering experiments confirm the causal disconnect. Alignment training thus encodes a norm of political neutrality, not by erasing the model's knowledge of partisanship, but by severing the causal pathway from partisan geometry to output generation. Importantly, this neutrality is functional, not structural so that the underlying geometry that enables partisan steering remains intact. The mechanisms that bypass RLHF's guardrails, such as inferring and amplifying a user's partisan identity, reactivate partisan generation. If alignment training operates by disconnecting rather than removing value-laden structure, then the same pattern may hold for other value domains, and the aligned model's behavior may be more fragile than its outputs suggest.

Wendy K. Tam

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

LLM Alignment LLM Interpretability Political Bias in Language Models

Jun 7, 2026cs.CL

The Amplifying Mirror: Locating and Steering the Partisan Direction inside a Large Language Model

Large language models are rapicly replacing search engines as the primary interface between people and information. Unlike search engines, which retrieve existing content, LLMs generate novel text shaped by internal representations learned during training. Here we show that partisan political identity is encoded in the model's activation space, and that this direction directly shapes generation. Using 190,491 tweets from sitting members of the U.S. Congress as labeled training data, we train linear probes on the hidden states of the Llama 3.1 8B Instruct model. We identify a single geometric axis at layer 18 that separates Republican from Democratic text with an AUC of 0.945 and a Cohen's d of 1.94, and use sparse autoencoders to decompose that axis into interpretable partisan features. Causally intervening along this axis, ablating or amplifying the partisan component mid-generation, produces systematic shifts in the model's output. We witness stance reversals, register shifting, and structured fabrications of authority. Our results demonstrate that partisan bias in language models is not a vague emergent property but a learned geometric feature that can be precisely located and steered. Partisan bias is not a bug to be patched, but a structural property of how these models encode information about their users. As LLMs displace search engines as the interface to knowledge, understanding that product design (and its consequences) will be essential for navigating the legal, social, and political transitions from an information ecosystem that is curated to one that is generated.

Wendy K. Tam

Professor and Stevenson Chair in the Departments of Political Science, Computer Science, Biomedical Informatics, and the Law School at Vanderbilt University

LLM Interpretability Political Bias in Language Models Linguistic Bias in Language Models Causal Interventions in Language Models Activation Steering

Jun 7, 2026cs.CY

Friend or Foe? Language as an ideological switch in open-weight LLMs under Russian disinformation stress

As Russia's war against Ukraine extends into generative AI, large language models (LLMs) adapted for local post-Soviet languages are deployed in contested information environments. Policy and industry discourse assumes that culturally aligned adaptation encodes the political orientation of the target community: a Ukrainian-oriented model will resist Russian narratives, a Russian-oriented one will reinforce them. Does it? This article systematically disconfirms that assumption. We run a controlled audit of four openly available LLMs sharing a common base model but fine-tuned for different linguistic communities, querying them in Ukrainian, Russian and English across ten contested wartime narratives: Crimea, "denazification", the "one people" thesis, and atrocity denial at Bucha and Mariupol. The result is a Fine-Tuning Paradox: the Ukrainian-oriented model shows the weakest resistance to Russian disinformation in Russian, while the Russian-oriented one exhibits the strongest rejection. Corpus composition, language coverage and prompt format prove more decisive than nominal cultural provenance. We situate these findings within debates on hybrid warfare, digital sovereignty and post-imperial information orders, arguing that the principal threat to regional information sovereignty is not adversarial fine-tuning but the untested assumption that cultural alignment guarantees resilience.

Anna Małgorzata Kamińska, Tetiana Klynina

Institute of Culture Studies, University of Silesia in Katowice, ul. Uniwersytecka 4, 40-007 Katowice, Poland · University of Texas at Austin 2515, TX 78712 Speedway Str., Texas, USA · National Aviation University, Liubomyr Huzar Avenue 1, Kyiv 03058, Ukraine

Multilingual Language Model Evaluation Political Bias in Language Models Language Model Bias Evaluation Language Model Robustness

Jun 4, 2026cs.CL

Does Topic Sentiment Cause Perceived Ideology? Comparing Human and LLM Annotations in Political News Articles

We ask whether topic sentiment has a causal effect on perceived political ideology, and whether the answer depends on who assigns the ideology label. Using articles from AllSides, paired with shared sentiment annotations from Llama-3.3-70b-versatile, we compare ideology labels from expert human annotators, GPT-4o-mini (baseline and finetuned), and Llama-3.3-70B. We apply Double Machine Learning (DML) and mediation analysis across all four annotation paradigms. Zero-shot LLMs regularly inflate effect sizes relative to human annotations, while fine-tuning often attenuates them back toward the human scale. Our results have implications for the use of LLM annotations as silver labels and as proxies for human judgment in downstream causal analyses: they may be reliable for recovering the presence and direction of effects on the partisan topics, but not their magnitude, leading to over- or under-prediction of some ideology given particular topics.

Upasana Chatterjee

Department of Computer Science Columbia University

LLM-Assisted Annotation Political Bias in Language Models Causal Inference

Jun 4, 2026cs.CL

Large Language Models are Perplexed by some Political Parties

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used, including in political applications, but their political fairness has been little studied. We assess it using perplexity, posing that a fair model should give equal probability to all political groups. However, we find, across ten LLMs and three datasets covering 37 languages, that LLMs are more perplexed by the texts of far right and nationalist parties than of social-democratic parties. We find this to be consistent with previous work on translation fairness, to the point that perplexity correlates with downstream translation metrics. Our method is applicable to both base LLMs as well as their instruction-tuned counterpart, and we find that both are highly correlated, suggesting that the political fairness of LLMs stems from their pretraining, and is hardly affected by instruction-tuning.

Paul Lerner, François Yvon

Sorbonne Université, CNRS, ISIR 75005, Paris, France

Multilingual Language Model Evaluation Political Bias in Language Models Language Model Bias Evaluation

Jun 3, 2026cs.CL

Large Language Models in K-12 Education: Alignment with State Curriculum Standards and Student Personas

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly popular in educational settings, they raise important questions about the ethical implications of their use. Publicly available online chatbots are quickly improving in capability and accuracy leading to more widespread use, including among students looking for help with their homework. This makes it crucial to consider whether these models are aligned with educational standards. Because curriculum standards in the United States are set at the state level, they differ significantly in required content, emphasis, and narrative focus. In this work, we develop an LLM-based pipeline to identify variations in U.S. History curricula across states and evaluate the extent to which different LLMs reflect these state-specific curricular differences. In addition, we conduct controlled experiments that vary user personas by stating user attributes such as geographic location, grade level, gender and race to evaluate the sensitivity of LLM responses to user characteristics. We find that while models are able to adjust their presentation of historical topics, these shifts may come from the perceived political leanings of states and do not necessarily reflect actual curriculum content. Additionally, models successfully adapt to a student's grade level while showing minimal sensitivity to race or gender, suggesting they are capable of useful adaptation to student personas with limited demographic bias. Together, these findings highlight potential risks that open access to LLM chatbots may cause to student learning outcomes stemming from misalignment with state curriculum standards and highlight the need for more robust alignment techniques.

Lisa Korver, Tomo Lazovich, Sherief Reda

Department of Computer Engineering · Brown University · Providence, RI 02906 +1

LLM Evaluation AI in Education Political Bias in Language Models Demographic Bias in Language Models

May 26, 2026stat.ML

Unsupervised Identification and Removal of Spurious Correlations During Fine-Tuning

Fine-tuning a pretrained language model on a curated dataset can produce spurious correlations between the fine-tuning task and unintended latent factors -- such as misaligned personas or political slant -- that the curation procedure has entangled with the task. The model can latch onto these spurious correlations, leading to bias and reduced out-of-distribution generalisation. We prove that under reasonable assumptions on task complexity and the spurious correlation, such latent factors can be identified, without supervision, from the weights of a naive LoRA fine-tune. Existing approaches to removing bias, such as activation steering, remove identified factors from residual-stream activations, either at inference or during training. We argue, however, that the goal should be to remove the spurious correlation, not the latent factor itself, as the pretrained model may rely on it for genuine task signal. To enable this, we propose GRASP, GRadient projection of Associated Spurious Patterns, which prevents the model from acquiring new reliance on the identified latent factor while preserving any pretrained content along it. We validate on three fine-tuning tasks. The first two involve emergent misalignment, where fine-tuning on a narrow task -- in our case, writing insecure code and giving bad medical advice -- leads to misaligned responses on unrelated topics. Here our method completely removes misalignment in the insecure code case and reduces them by ~5x in the bad medical advice case, beating all baselines in the trade-off between misalignment-reduction and task-preservation. The last is a novel political-bias experiment, where fine-tuning on right-skewed Reddit financial-advice data causes political-lean drift on unrelated topics. Here our method reduces drift by more than half, while improving financial task performance, beating all baselines.

Ciarán M. Gilligan-Lee, Joseph Egan, Yuchen Zhu +1

University College London · University College London† · Spotify

LLM Fine-Tuning Political Bias in Language Models Spurious Correlation Robustness Emergent Misalignment