A new article in World Politics by Chappell Lawson, Gabriel Lenz, Andy Baker, and Michael Myers provides new and innovative evidence on the importance of looks in running for office (ungated version here). In a very clever research design, the authors asked Americans and Indians to evaluate the attractiveness of Mexican and Brazilian candidates for office. They not only found that Americans and Indians had pretty similar ideas about who was more attractive but also that their judgments predicted the outcomes of Mexican and Brazilian elections surprisingly well. Perhaps American prognosticators for the midterm elections should ask Mexicans and Brazilians about the attractiveness of U.S. candidates to improve the predictive power of their models (edit: actually the obvious implication is to outsource this to Indians).
The abstract is below. Our very own Lee was a pioneer in this line of research.
Abstract:A flurry of recent studies indicates that candidates who simply look more capable or attractive are more likely to win elections. In this article, the authors investigate whether voters’ snap judgments of appearance travel across cultures and whether they influence elections in new democracies. They show unlabeled, black-and-white pictures of Mexican and Brazilian candidates’ faces to subjects living in America and India, asking them which candidates would be better elected officials. Despite cultural, ethnic, and racial differences, Americans and Indians agree about which candidates are superficially appealing (correlations ranging from .70 to .87). Moreover, these superficial judgments appear to have a profound influence on Mexican and Brazilian voters, as the American and Indian judgments predict actual election returns with surprising accuracy. These effects, the results also suggest, may depend on the rules of the electoral game, with institutions exacerbating or mitigating the effects of appearance.
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