mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

LLM-Ideoplasticity: Measuring Ideological Plasticity in the Political Behavior of LLMs as a Context-Conditioned Distribution

arXiv 2606.28335 ↗First posted 26 May 2026cs.CY cs.AI cs.CLcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

We argue, with systematic empirical evidence, that a large language model's political ideology is not a fixed point, but a conditional distribution mathbbP(positionmidcontext) over a real political space. We evaluate nine current LLMs using a unified measurement framework anchored by VAA-CHES projection models, which map responses onto three validated dimensions (lrgen, lrecon, galtan) across six contextual axes. Our findings reveal high sensitivity to context: persuasive framing and under-represented languages displace coordinates by up to 0.57 and 0.52 units, respectively, while chain-of-thought reasoning often amplifies rather than dampens paraphrase instability. Despite this local plasticity, the model cohort occupies a remarkably narrow Overton envelope overall, occupying roughly one-third the spread of major European parties. Supported by a multi-trait multi-method (MTMM) analysis, we conclude that a single point cannot summarize LLM political behavior; it must be characterized as a shape. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/sakhadib/LLM-Ideoplasticity.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 19 of its 46 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 May 2026.

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19 of 46 references.

References · 19

  1. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
  2. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,796
  3. 2024A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judgecited by 1,423
  4. 2022Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluationscited by 836
  5. 2022Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samplescited by 752
  6. 2023Large Language Models Are Not Robust Multiple Choice Selectorscited by 486
  7. 2024Judging the Judges: A Systematic Study of Position Bias in LLM-as-a-Judgecited by 269
  8. 2023From Pretraining Data to Language Models to Downstream Tasks: Tracking the Trails of Political Biases Leading to Unfair NLP Modelscited by 260
  9. 2024LLMs instead of Human Judges? A Large Scale Empirical Study across 20 NLP Evaluation Taskscited by 243
  10. 2023The political ideology of conversational AI: Converging evidence on ChatGPT's pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientationcited by 189
  11. 2024Political Compass or Spinning Arrow? Towards More Meaningful Evaluations for Values and Opinions in Large Language Modelscited by 162
  12. 2024Beyond prompt brittleness: Evaluating the reliability and consistency of political worldviews in LLMscited by 55
7 more
  1. 2024Personas with Attitudes: Controlling LLMs for Diverse Data Annotationcited by 21
  2. 2026Diagnosing the Reliability of LLM-as-a-Judge via Item Response Theorycited by 16
  3. 2025Only a Little to the Left: A Theory-grounded Measure of Political Bias in Large Language Modelscited by 15
  4. 2026Uncovering Political Bias in Large Language Models using Parliamentary Voting Recordscited by 8
  5. 2026Political Alignment in Large Language Models: A Multidimensional Audit of Psychometric Identity and Behavioral Biascited by 5
  6. 2025A Detailed Factor Analysis for the Political Compass Test: Navigating Ideologies of Large Language Modelscited by 3
  7. 2025POW: Political Overton Windows of Large Language Modelscited by 3

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  1. 2025Examining Alignment of Large Language Models through Representative Heuristics: The Case of Political Stereotypes
  2. 2025When Models Refuse: Political Steerability and Feature Richness as Measures of Ideological Depth
  3. 2024The Political Preferences of LLMs
  4. 2026Navigating the digital spectrum: Assessing political bias, stability, and downstream fairness in Large Language Models
  5. 2025Linear Representations of Political Perspective Emerge in Large Language Models
  6. 2025PReSS: An Automated Black-Box Framework for Evaluating Political Stance Stability in LLMs
  7. 2025Are LLMs (Really) Ideological? An IRT-based Analysis and Alignment Tool for Perceived Socio-Economic Bias in LLMs
  8. 2025Language, Culture, and Ideology: Personalizing Offensiveness Detection in Political Tweets with Reasoning LLMs