Submission 28
Facing the "Face": An LLM-Assisted Study on the Alignment of Political Leader Traits
Panel 3-LI-2407-05
Presented by: zhexi LIU
In the field of international relations theory, researchers frequently focus on the decision-making processes or actions of key political actors during critical junctures; however, these political actors are often inaccessible to researchers. Existing studies investigating the impact of such actors' specific traits on international political decision-making typically employ methods such as empirical analysis, experiments, and interviews. Nevertheless, database-driven empirical analyses struggle to capture the nuanced traits of actors—such as political leaders or diplomats—while subjects in experimental designs often differ significantly from the actual roles involved in real-world international politics; furthermore, the interview method—though arguably the closest to the reality of international politics—presents significant practical challenges in its implementation. The advancement of research into the model alignment and the interpretability of language models offers a promising opportunity to explore these types of questions. This raises the question: Is it possible to leverage language models to construct a class of international political figures endowed with specific traits, thereby utilizing them as experimental or analytical subjects for theoretical research? This paper attempts to address this by employing three distinct methods: zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, and activation vector steering based on language models. Furthermore, drawing upon a continuously updated database GDELT, we have constructed a real-time database documenting the actions of a vast number of contemporary political leaders. Using this database, we conduct data-driven verifications of the models' alignment results regarding specific types of political figures possessing defined traits, alongside statistical assessments of the results' reliability and validity. This study represents a preliminary endeavor toward conducting scientific experiments involving LLM agents representing international political figures, situated within the framework of the Fifth Paradigm of social science research.