Beyond Western Politics: Cross-Cultural Benchmarks for Evaluating Partisan Associations in LLMs

Abstract: Partisan bias in LLMs has been evaluated to assess political leanings, typically through a broad lens and largely in Western contexts. We move beyond identifying general leanings to examine harmful, adversarial representational associations around political leaders and parties. To do so, we create datasets \textit{NeutQA-440} (non-adversarial prompts) and \textit{AdverQA-440} (adversarial prompts), which probe models for comparative plausibility judgments across the USA and India. Results show high susceptibility to biased partisan associations and pronounced asymmetries (e.g., substantially more favorable associations for U.S. Democrats than Republicans) alongside mixed-polarity concentration around India's BJP, highlighting systemic risks and motivating standardized, cross-cultural evaluation.