Working Paper Series
No 855:
The Right Look: Conservative Politicians Look Better and Voters Reward It
Niclas Berggren ()
, Henrik Jordahl ()
and Panu Poutvaara ()
Abstract: Political candidates on the right are more beautiful or
are seen as more competent than candidates on the left in Australia,
Finland, France, and the United States. This appearance gap gives
candidates on the right an advantage in elections, which could in turn
influence policy outcomes. As an illustration, the Republican share of
seats increased by an average of 6% in the 2000–2006 U.S. Senate elections
because they fielded candidates who looked more competent. These shifts are
big enough to have given the Republicans a Senate majority in two of the
four Congresses in the studied time period. The Republicans also won nine
of the 15 gubernatorial elections where looks were decisive. Using Finnish
data, we also show that beauty is an asset for political candidates in
intra-party competition and more so for candidates on the right in
low-information elections. Our analysis indicates that this advantage
arises since voters use good looks as a cue for conservatism when
candidates are relatively unknown.
Keywords: Beauty; Elections; Political candidates; Appearance; Ideology; Parties; (follow links to similar papers)
JEL-Codes: D72; J45; J70; (follow links to similar papers)
28 pages, December 20, 2010, Revised February 8, 2012
Before downloading any of the electronic versions below
you should read our statement on
copyright.
Download GhostScript
for viewing Postscript files and the
Acrobat Reader for viewing and printing pdf files.
Full text versions of the paper:
wp855.pdf 
Download Statistics
Questions (including download problems) about the papers in this series should be directed to Elisabeth Gustafsson ()
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ()
or Helena Lundin ().
Programing by
Design by Joachim Ekebom
