Social Policy of Large Language Models: How GPT, Claude, DeepSeek and Grok Allocate Social Budgets in Spain and Germany

TL;DR

This study analyzes how four large language models allocate social budgets in Spain and Germany, revealing systematic biases and differences in sensitivity to national contexts, with implications for their use in public policy support.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of LLMs' social policy allocations across countries, highlighting biases, model differences, and the potential for supporting public budgeting decisions.

Findings

All models under-allocate pensions by a factor close to three.

Housing and employment are over-allocated by factors of four and two respectively.

Claude shows substantive sensitivity to national context.

Abstract

We study how four widely used large language models, namely Claude, GPT-4o, DeepSeek and Grok, distribute a fixed national social budget across twelve macro-areas of public expenditure under two European national contexts, Spain and Germany. Each combination of model and country is queried six times under identical prompts and generation parameters, producing forty-eight independent allocations that are compared against approximate Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reference budgets and against each other. We formalise five hypotheses regarding geopolitical bias, housing under-allocation, structural convergence, sensitivity to national context, and under-representation of politically sensitive categories. The differences between models are then validated through Kruskal-Wallis tests on each macro-area, with post-hoc Mann-Whitney U comparisons under Bonferroni correction, and complemented by an analysis of pairwise Pearson correlations and a lexical examination of the textual justifications produced by each model. The results show that all four models share a systematic implicit social policy that diverges from real European spending structures: pensions are under-allocated by a factor close to three, while housing and employment are over-allocated by factors of four and two respectively. The principal axis of differentiation between models is not geopolitical, since Claude and DeepSeek are the most correlated pair across both countries, but rather a contrast between concentration and dispersion of the budget. Only Claude exhibits substantive sensitivity to the national context. The conclusions delimit the conditions under which language models may responsibly support, but not replace, expert deliberation in public budgeting.