Physical attractiveness, voter heuristics and electoral systems: The role of candidate attractiveness under different institutional designs
| Author | Rodrigo Praino,Daniel Stockemer |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148116687533 |
| Published date | 01 May 2017 |
| Date | 01 May 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2017
Article
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
Physical attractiveness,
2017, Vol. 19(2) 336 –352
© The Author(s) 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148116687533
DOI: 10.1177/1369148116687533
systems: The role of candidate
journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi
attractiveness under different
institutional designs
Daniel Stockemer1 and Rodrigo Praino2
Abstract
While existing studies have shown that more attractive candidates running for office have an
electoral advantage, very little has been written on how this advantage relates to different
institutions. We theorise that formal institutions mediate the positive effect from which attractive
candidates benefit. More in detail, we focus on the type of electoral system, hypothesising that
physical attractiveness plays a more important role in majoritarian, first-past-the-post systems
than in list proportional systems. We test this stipulation using the German federal elections’ two-
tier electoral system, together with data collected in Australia on the physical attractiveness of
German federal election candidates in 2013. A series of bivariate and multivariate statistics show
that physical attractiveness is a significant factor explaining a candidate’s likelihood to win in the
FPTP tier, but not in the list proportional representation (PR) tier.
Keywords
elections, electoral system, physical attractiveness, proportional representation, single member
plurality
[…] I hazard the conjecture, that the beautiful is the friend, as the old proverb says.
Beauty is certainly a soft, smooth, slippery thing, and therefore of a nature which easily
slips in and permeates our souls.
Plato, Lysis
Introduction
What was true for Plato is still true today; since the cradle of Western civilisation, we
have been all fascinated by physical beauty. Recent empirical research (see Barelds-
Dijkstra and Dick, 2008; Halford and Hsu, 2013; Olivola and Todorov, 2010a; Rosar and
1School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada
2School of Social and Policy Studies, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia
Corresponding author:
Rodrigo Praino, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, SA 5001, Australia.
Email: rodrigo.praino@flinders.edu.au
Stockemer and Praino
337
Klein, 2014; Stockemer and Praino, 2015) shows that attractive individuals enjoy a wide
range of advantages in the most disparate fields of human activity, from interpersonal
relations and job prospects, all the way to the stock market. Politics is no exception to this
general rule.
Since Efrain and Patterson (1974) published what, to our knowledge, is the first empiri-
cal research paper on the electoral effects of physical attractiveness, a large number of stud-
ies have confirmed that more attractive candidates tend to enjoy an electoral advantage in
comparison to their less attractive colleagues (see for example Albright et al., 1997; Lawson
et al., 2010; Praino et al., 2014; Todorov et al., 2005). Yet, what is still unclear is whether
this electoral advantage is institution neutral or not. We think that the institutional context
under which voters operate should have a lasting effect on their decision-making process
(see Campbell, 2004; Skocpol, 1985; Rosar and Klein, 2014). More in detail, we focus on
the type of electoral system and hypothesise that physical attractiveness plays a more impor-
tant role under personalistic electoral systems (i.e. first-past-the-post (FPTP) systems) than
in less personalistic systems (i.e. list proportional systems). To test this stipulation, we use
the German Federal Elections, which are held under a mixed member proportional (MMP)
system. In other words, half of the members of the German national parliament are elected
by simple majoritarian rule, while the other half is selected through a proportional represen-
tation (PR) system. If our stipulation is correct, then in the first tier the physical attractive-
ness of candidates should be a significant predictor of their likelihood to get elected to
parliament, while the same should not apply for the second tier.
We test our hypothesis based on data from North Rhine Westphalia, the largest German
federal state. In a first step, we have about 100 Australian students rank the physical
attractiveness of all North Rhine Westphalian candidates to the German Bundestag. We
then collect electoral data and a host of other variables that might influence the electoral
chances of candidates running for office. Finally, we use these data for two types of analy-
ses. Employing descriptive statistics, we test for all members of parliament (MPs), and
then separately for the first and second tier, whether those elected to office are better
looking than those not elected. Second, we run several multiple logistic regression mod-
els showing that physical attractiveness is, in fact, related to the likelihood of candidates
getting elected in the majoritarian tier, but not in the PR tier.
Physical attractiveness: A ‘cheap’ heuristic shortcut
If Anthony Downs (1957) introduced to modern political science the idea that voters may
not be willing to spend their time and resources in order to obtain relevant information
about individuals running for office, the subsequent 50 years of empirical research have
demonstrated that, as time has gone by, voters have remained extremely ill-informed
about politics, in general, and about political candidates, in particular, all over the world
(Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996; Prior, 2014).1 However, political knowledge is necessary
for voters to make an informed choice (Johann, 2012). Voters who do not possess this
instrumental good (i.e. the vast majority of voters worldwide, according to much of the
existing empirical research) must utilise heuristic shortcuts in order to obtain the informa-
tion they need, to decide who they should vote for. Some of these shortcuts that voters use
to make voting decisions in presence of low levels of information are the ideology of
candidates running for office, the endorsements they receive, and the results of opinion
polls (see for example Lau and Redlawsk, 2001). Among these political heuristics, party
affiliation is often considered not only as ‘the most reliable and “cheapest cue” available
338
The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19(2)
to voters’ (Schaffner and Streb, 2002: 560), but also as quite effective and capable of
generating reliable political judgements (Lau and Redlawsk, 1997; Mondak, 1993).
According to Popkin’s (1994) idea of ‘low information rationality’, voters behave ration-
ally in a low information environment through the use of heuristics. Unfortunately, how-
ever, there is one heuristic shortcut that is even ‘cheaper’ and more instantaneous than
party affiliation, albeit much less conducive to a state of ‘low information rationality’:
candidate appearance.
Candidate appearance is the ultimate low-resources heuristic shortcut, because in a
world where individuals are constantly exposed to pictures of candidates (see Rosar et al.,
2008), it requires virtually no effort from voters to judge the physical attractiveness of
candidates. There is evidence that people can and do make instantaneous trait judgements
when they are exposed to someone’s physical appearance for as little as 100 milliseconds
(Olivola and Todorov, 2010a; 2010b; Todorov et al., 2009; Willis and Todorov, 2006).
Attractive individuals enjoy advantages in the most disparate areas of human activity,
from interpersonal relations to job prospects and even the stock market. At the personal
level, physical attractiveness is associated with friendliness, competence, intelligence and
sociability (Brewer and Archer, 2007). In interpersonal interactions (both formal and
informal), physically attractive individuals are treated more favourably than less attrac-
tive ones (Barelds-Dijkstra and Dick, 2008). In the business world, attractive individuals
get a pay premium of several percentage points and advance faster in their careers
(Watkins and Johnston, 2000). Better-looking job interviewees have higher chances of
getting the job for which they are applying, and the physical attractiveness of CEOs influ-
ences the stock value of their companies (Halford and Hsu, 2013). In brief, physical
attractiveness appears important in the modern world, with the notorious ‘beautiful is
good’ axiom being visible in many societal domains (Lau and Redlawsk, 2001; North
et al., 2010). Politics is no exception to this rule. More than 30 years of research have
shown that better-looking candidates to electoral office are advantaged in elections
(Berggren et al., 2010; King and Leigh, 2009). These studies, which focus on developed
(see Rosar et al., 2012) and developing countries (see Lawson et al., 2010), consistently
find that, overall, more attractive candidates for public office gain an electoral advantage
when compared to their less attractive colleagues (see for example Banducci et al., 2008;
Praino et al., 2014; Rosar et al., 2008).2 While confirming a positive relationship between
physical appearance and overall vote margins, some studies (Atkinson et al., 2009) posit
that such electoral advantage is not enough to determine the result of...
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