@inproceedings{yuan-etal-2026-moral,
title = "Moral Lenses, Political Coordinates: Towards Ideological Positioning of Morally Conditioned {LLM}s",
author = "Yuan, Chenchen and
Ma, Bolei and
Zhang, Zheyu and
Prenkaj, Bardh and
Kreuter, Frauke and
Kasneci, Gjergji",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.262/",
pages = "5950--5984",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "While recent research has systematically documented political orientation in large language models (LLMs), existing evaluations rely primarily on direct probing or demographic persona engineering to surface ideological biases. In social psychology, however, political ideology is also understood as a downstream consequence of fundamental moral intuitions. In this work, we manipulate the moral conditioning and investigate the changes in the model{'}s political behaviors. Rather than simply assigning a demographic persona, we condition models to endorse or reject specific moral values and evaluate the resulting shifts on their political orientations, using the Political Compass Test. By treating moral values as lenses, we observe how moral conditioning actively modulates model trajectories across economic and social dimensions. Our findings show that such conditioning induces pronounced, value-specific shifts in models' political coordinates. We further notice that these effects are systematically modulated by role framing and model scale, and are robust across alternative assessment instruments instantiating the same moral value. This highlights that effective alignment requires anchoring political assessments within the context of broader social values including morality, paving the way for more socially grounded alignment techniques."
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<abstract>While recent research has systematically documented political orientation in large language models (LLMs), existing evaluations rely primarily on direct probing or demographic persona engineering to surface ideological biases. In social psychology, however, political ideology is also understood as a downstream consequence of fundamental moral intuitions. In this work, we manipulate the moral conditioning and investigate the changes in the model’s political behaviors. Rather than simply assigning a demographic persona, we condition models to endorse or reject specific moral values and evaluate the resulting shifts on their political orientations, using the Political Compass Test. By treating moral values as lenses, we observe how moral conditioning actively modulates model trajectories across economic and social dimensions. Our findings show that such conditioning induces pronounced, value-specific shifts in models’ political coordinates. We further notice that these effects are systematically modulated by role framing and model scale, and are robust across alternative assessment instruments instantiating the same moral value. This highlights that effective alignment requires anchoring political assessments within the context of broader social values including morality, paving the way for more socially grounded alignment techniques.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Moral Lenses, Political Coordinates: Towards Ideological Positioning of Morally Conditioned LLMs
%A Yuan, Chenchen
%A Ma, Bolei
%A Zhang, Zheyu
%A Prenkaj, Bardh
%A Kreuter, Frauke
%A Kasneci, Gjergji
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F yuan-etal-2026-moral
%X While recent research has systematically documented political orientation in large language models (LLMs), existing evaluations rely primarily on direct probing or demographic persona engineering to surface ideological biases. In social psychology, however, political ideology is also understood as a downstream consequence of fundamental moral intuitions. In this work, we manipulate the moral conditioning and investigate the changes in the model’s political behaviors. Rather than simply assigning a demographic persona, we condition models to endorse or reject specific moral values and evaluate the resulting shifts on their political orientations, using the Political Compass Test. By treating moral values as lenses, we observe how moral conditioning actively modulates model trajectories across economic and social dimensions. Our findings show that such conditioning induces pronounced, value-specific shifts in models’ political coordinates. We further notice that these effects are systematically modulated by role framing and model scale, and are robust across alternative assessment instruments instantiating the same moral value. This highlights that effective alignment requires anchoring political assessments within the context of broader social values including morality, paving the way for more socially grounded alignment techniques.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.262/
%P 5950-5984
Markdown (Informal)
[Moral Lenses, Political Coordinates: Towards Ideological Positioning of Morally Conditioned LLMs](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.262/) (Yuan et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL