it varies a lot with polymers, and it's a different effect. steel is entirely crystalline; ldpe is mostly amorphous. a big part of what's happening in the strain hardening of ldpe, aside from making it uniaxially oriented, is that it's crystallizing; the crystalline domains become larger, greatly reducing the amorphous volume fraction. (there are also other ways of achieving this effect, such as annealing, which you will notice softens steel rather than hardening it.) ldpe's strength isn't determined by crystal dislocation density in the same way as steel's, and of course steel doesn't have polymer chains to align
