Progressive in Principle, Centrist in Practice: LLM Political Bias Is Instrument-Dependent

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2606.00048v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prior work establishes that instruction-tuned LLMs exhibit left-of-center political bias, but measures it exclusively through abstract questionnaires. We show this does not generalize to concrete policy decisions. We introduce a dual-instrument methodology grounded in Swiss direct democracy: the Smartvote questionnaire (75 policy questions), administered to 66 LLMs and compared to 184 elected members of the Swiss National Council, and 48 real federal referenda (Volksabstimmungen) put to 9 flagship LLMs in four national languages and three information conditions, compared to actual outcomes and party recommendations (Parolen). The instruments disagree. (1) The left-to-right agreement gradient that dominates Smartvote (replicating pri