Bias Beyond Borders: Political Ideology Evaluation and Steering in Multilingual LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Nadeem, Afrozah, Seth, Agrima, Nasim, Mehwish, Naseem, Usman
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Nadeem, Afrozah
Seth, Agrima
Nasim, Mehwish
Naseem, Usman
author_facet Nadeem, Afrozah
Seth, Agrima
Nasim, Mehwish
Naseem, Usman
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly shape global discourse, making fairness and ideological neutrality essential for responsible AI deployment. Despite growing attention to political bias in LLMs, prior work largely focuses on high-resource, Western languages or narrow multilingual settings, leaving cross-lingual consistency and safe post-hoc mitigation underexplored. To address this gap, we present a large-scale multilingual evaluation of political bias spanning 50 countries and 33 languages. We introduce a complementary post-hoc mitigation framework, Cross-Lingual Alignment Steering (CLAS), designed to augment existing steering methods by aligning ideological representations across languages and dynamically regulating intervention strength. This method aligns latent ideological representations induced by political prompts into a shared ideological subspace, ensuring cross lingual consistency, with the adaptive mechanism prevents over correction and preserves coherence. Experiments demonstrate substantial bias reduction along both economic and social axes with minimal degradation in response quality. The proposed framework establishes a scalable and interpretable paradigm for fairness-aware multilingual LLM governance, balancing ideological neutrality with linguistic and cultural diversity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_23001
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bias Beyond Borders: Political Ideology Evaluation and Steering in Multilingual LLMs
Nadeem, Afrozah
Seth, Agrima
Nasim, Mehwish
Naseem, Usman
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly shape global discourse, making fairness and ideological neutrality essential for responsible AI deployment. Despite growing attention to political bias in LLMs, prior work largely focuses on high-resource, Western languages or narrow multilingual settings, leaving cross-lingual consistency and safe post-hoc mitigation underexplored. To address this gap, we present a large-scale multilingual evaluation of political bias spanning 50 countries and 33 languages. We introduce a complementary post-hoc mitigation framework, Cross-Lingual Alignment Steering (CLAS), designed to augment existing steering methods by aligning ideological representations across languages and dynamically regulating intervention strength. This method aligns latent ideological representations induced by political prompts into a shared ideological subspace, ensuring cross lingual consistency, with the adaptive mechanism prevents over correction and preserves coherence. Experiments demonstrate substantial bias reduction along both economic and social axes with minimal degradation in response quality. The proposed framework establishes a scalable and interpretable paradigm for fairness-aware multilingual LLM governance, balancing ideological neutrality with linguistic and cultural diversity.
title Bias Beyond Borders: Political Ideology Evaluation and Steering in Multilingual LLMs
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.23001