Moral Lenses, Political Coordinates: Towards Ideological Positioning of Morally Conditioned LLMs

TL;DR

This paper explores how conditioning large language models on specific moral values can causally influence their political orientations, revealing value-specific shifts and implications for socially grounded alignment.

Contribution

It introduces a method to steer LLMs' political positions via moral conditioning, linking moral intuitions to ideological biases systematically.

Findings

Moral conditioning causes significant shifts in political coordinates.

Effects are influenced by role framing and model scale.

Robust across different moral assessment tools.

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 investigate the causal relationship between moral values and political positioning by treating moral orientation as a controllable condition. 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 steers 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.