Progressive in Principle, Centrist in Practice: LLM Political Bias Is Instrument-Dependent
Prior work establishes that instruction-tuned LLMs exhibit left-of-center political bias, but measures it exclusively through abstract questionnaires. We show it does not predict how models vote on concrete policies. We introduce a dual-instrument methodology grounded in Swiss direct democracy. First, we administer the Smartvote questionnaire (75 policy questions) to 66 LLMs and compare their answers to those of 184 elected members of the Swiss National Council. Second, we put 48 real federal referenda (Volksabstimmungen) to 9 flagship LLMs in four national languages and three information conditions, and compare their votes to the actual outcomes and to party recommendations (Parolen). Th...
| Authors | Joel P. Barmettler |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CY |
| Published | 3 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 August 2026 |
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