The looks of a winner: Beauty and electoral success

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Berggren, Niclas; Jordahl, Henrik; Poutvaara, Panu
• 署名单位: University of Helsinki; Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN)
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2009.11.002
• 发表日期: 2010
• 页码: 8-15
• 关键词: Beauty; ELECTIONS; Political candidates; appearance; competence; trustworthiness

摘要

We study the role of beauty in politics using candidate photos that figured prominently in electoral campaigns Our investigation is based oil visual assessments of 1929 Finnish political candidates from 10,011 respondents (of which 3708 were Finnish) As Finland has a proportional electoral system, we are able to compare the electoral success of non-incumbent candidates representing the same party An increase in our measure of beauty by one standard deviation is associated with an increase of 20% in the number of votes for the average non-incumbent parliamentary candidate The relationship is unaffected by including education and Occupation as control variables and withstands several other robustness checks (C) 2009 Elsevier B V All rights reserved