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Political Bias in Large Language Models: Insights Across Topic Polarization (arxiv.org)
9 points by PaulHoule on Jan 7, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | 2 comments on HN

In plain words: Instead of making chatbots role-play as liberals or conservatives, the study asked 43 models survey questions, scoring partisan lean and engagement on less polarized issues. Most leaned center-left or left, and neither size nor open release predicted behavior — training choices and institutions mattered more.

Abstract · Beyond Partisan Leaning: A Comparative Analysis of Political Bias in Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly embedded in civic, educational, and political information environments, concerns about their potential political bias have grown. Prior research often evaluates such bias through simulated personas or predefined ideological typologies, which may introduce artificial framing effects or overlook how models behave in general use scenarios. This study adopts a persona-free, topic-specific approach to evaluate political behavior in LLMs, reflecting how users typically interact with these systems-without ideological role-play or conditioning. We introduce a two-dimensional framework: one axis captures partisan orientation on highly polarized topics (e.g., abortion, immigration), and the other assesses sociopolitical engagement on less polarized issues (e.g., climate change, foreign policy). Using survey-style prompts drawn from the ANES and Pew Research Center, we analyze responses from 43 LLMs developed in the U.S., Europe, China, and the Middle East. We propose an entropy-weighted bias score to quantify both the direction and consistency of partisan alignment, and identify four behavioral clusters through engagement profiles. Findings show most models lean center-left or left ideologically and vary in their nonpartisan engagement patterns. Model scale and openness are not strong predictors of behavior, suggesting that alignment strategy and institutional context play a more decisive role in shaping political expression.

Tai-Quan Peng, Kaiqi Yang, Sanguk Lee, Hang Li, Yucheng Chu, Yuping Lin, Hui Liu
arXiv:2412.16746 · cs.CY, cs.AI · submitted Dec 21, 2024 · updated May 10, 2025
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Just a thought: avoiding political bias could it's own form of bias. I would think the goal is mostly to get "correct" answers based on facts, logic, and so on. If a "correct" answer can be computed (what does that mean with an LLM?), then it might be biased, but still desirable.
This sounds like category error to me. LLMs output string completions. Humans should judge the set of outputs to be representative of what humans would write. All humans, not biased to the subset of liberal humans.

The bias is thinking the liberal ideas are correct ideas.