Are beautiful politicians more likely to win?

Résumé du document

The paper deals with the question : "Are beautiful politicians more likely to win?", a homework made for a Political Psychology class. We're interested to learn how nonverbal cues impact the voters, even when they do not intend to do so. The paper explores how attractiveness can impact voters' decisions and explains how the impact of beauty isn't uniform in the vote share because it is not equal for all the candidates, depending on their political appurtenance and their gender. The document uses different results from studies/researches made about the link between physical appearance and voting intention.

Extraits

[...] Nevertheless, politicians could use this information we pulled from these different studies to use attractiveness as a powerful tool for future elections. Though, they already pay a lot attention to their images, as we can see through the role of their communication consultants. REFERENCES Voters vote beautiful: the effect of physical appearance on a national election, MICHAEL G. EFRAN AND E.W.J. PATTERSON, University of Toronto Beauty in Politics, Panu Poutvaara Ifo Institute – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich Nonverbal behavior and leadership : emotion and cognition in political information processing, Roger Masters and Denis Sullivan Beautiful politicians, Amy King and Andrew Leigh, November 2009 The effects of physical attractiveness on political Beliefs, Rolfe D. [...]

[...] But there is also another discover: conservative politicians look better, and voters reward it. Table Average beauty evaluations of Finnish candidates from the left and from the right (Berggren, 2015) Table Beauty advantages in the Right parties in different countries (Berggren, 2017) Table 1 shows that candidates on the right, meaning conservative candidates in Finland, have higher beauty evaluations than candidates on the left. While Table 2 proves that not only in Finland, but also in Australia, in the United States and in the European Union, we can observe the same tendency. [...]

[...] Obviously, we can wonder if a person's attractiveness has any impact in the political sphere, and more precisely, during the elections. The main idea we're going to explain and defend in this paper is that it is possible to shape a political candidate's image, in a way which may even affect electoral outcomes. The results in the different studies we're going to explore express the idea there is a close link between the physical attractiveness and the political success, and that this link is strongly positive. [...]

[...] But still, attractiveness has an effect on ideology because beautiful individuals are more likely to identify as Republicans. The effects are present and persistent. RESULTS The method used to experiment Efran and Patterson's theory was made during the context of the 1972 Canadian federal election. They took a sample of 79 parliamentary candidates and obtained a photograph of each candidate. A high school students group, made up of 47 male and 23 female, was asked to rate for physical appearance the photographs. [...]

[...] Thus, the impact of beauty isn't going to be the same if, for example, the candidate is going to be a man or a woman, if he/she is running for Liberal Party or Labor Party, etc. The impact of beauty is going to be stronger for male candidates. But what about the link between the beauty impact on the political success? Panu Poutvaara, in 2017, in his research ‘Beauty in Politics', tries to find if the link between the beauty impact and the political success is causal or not. [...]