Political Ideology Shifts in Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in politically sensitive contexts, raising concerns about their susceptibility to ideological biases. In this work, we examine how synthetic persona conditioning shapes ideological expression across seven open-weight instruction-tuned models (7B-72B parameters) using the Political Compass Test (62 statements) as a standardized behavioral probe. Across three studies involving 200,000 synthetic personas and more than 260 million model responses, we analyze implicit and explicit malleability, as well as theme-associated variations. We find that: (i) larger models exhibit broader implicit ideological coverage, increasing from 14-35% for 7-8B models to up to 49% for 70B+ models; (ii) explicit ideological priming induces large and statistically significant shifts, with right-authoritarian cues moving all models in the intended direction and producing larger effects in most model-axis comparisons; (iii) left-libertarian priming produces more heterogeneous responses, including counter-directional economic shifts in three of four 7-8B models, while all 70B+ models move in the intended direction; and (iv) theme-associated semantic content in persona descriptions is linked to systematic and interpretable directional shifts in ideological space. While our results identify an upstream mechanism through which persona conditioning can alter model responses under a standardized ideological probe, we do not test whether such shifts affect users beliefs, decisions, or political behavior. Our findings are best understood as evidence of ideological malleability at the generation layer, highlighting the need to account for interactional factors when evaluating political neutrality, fairness, and safety in English-prompted, persona-conditioned language models.