Large Language Models as Implicit Sociological Models: Reconstructing Voting Behaviour from Sociodemographic Profiles
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Abstract (arXiv)
Large language models (LLMs) trained on large-scale internet corpora encode extensive statistical regularities about social identities, attitudes, and political behaviour. This paper introduces and evaluates a methodological framework that leverages these latent representations to reconstruct aggregate voting behaviour from individual-level sociodemographic profiles. We operationalize LLMs as implicit sociological models by conditioning them on demographic descriptions, eliciting probabilistic turnout and party preferences, and aggregating individual outputs via a soft voting procedure. Using the 2021 Czech parliamentary election as a validation case, we demonstrate that contemporary LLMs reproduce official election outcomes with low mean absolute error, recover known political bloc structures, and align with independently established sociodemographic gradients. The contribution of this work is methodological rather than predictive: we show how LLMs can be systematically interrogated as compressed representations of social reality, offering a novel exploratory instrument for computational social science while clearly delineating its epistemic and ethical limits.
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References · 9
- 2023Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviorcited by 3,568
- 2016Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biasescited by 901
- 2023Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?cited by 773
- 2022Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samplescited by 752
- 2024The Political Preferences of LLMscited by 84
- 2025Linear Representations of Political Perspective Emerge in Large Language Modelscited by 32
- 2024BenCzechMark : A Czech-centric Multitask and Multimetric Benchmark for Large Language Models with Duel Scoring Mechanismcited by 12
- 2024United in Diversity? Contextual Biases in LLM-Based Predictions of the 2024 European Parliament Electionscited by 5
- 2025Multilingual Political Views of Large Language Models: Identification and Steeringcited by 5
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