The Center for Communication and Public Policy (CCPP) is part of an interdisciplinary Northwestern team that has received a $200,000 award from the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs to support the Global LLM Values Benchmarking Working Group. The project includes CCPP Director Erik Nisbet and CCPP faculty affiliate Yingdan Lu, who join collaborators across communication, computer science, law, and global studies to advance globally grounded evaluation standards for frontier AI systems.
The Global LLM Values Benchmarking initiative focuses on assessing how large language models encode and express political values across different cultural, regional, and governance contexts. Its goal is to develop comparative benchmarks that measure how AI systems respond to value-laden questions, articulate political norms, and reflect varied democratic and legal traditions. This work addresses a major gap in current AI evaluation frameworks, which are often limited to Western-centric perspectives.
Nisbet and Lu bring expertise in political communication, public opinion, information integrity, and democratic governance. They will contribute to the design of value-based assessment frameworks, interpret cross-national benchmarking patterns, and help translate findings into insights relevant for policymakers, civil society organizations, and global AI governance efforts.
The award reinforces CCPP’s commitment to advancing research at the intersection of technology, information integrity, and democratic governance. By contributing to this collaborative working group, CCPP expands its efforts to understand how emerging AI systems shape political information environments, public opinion, and democratic resilience, while helping position Northwestern as a leader in developing transparent, accountable, and public-interest evaluation standards for rapidly evolving AI technologies.