Did any CoffeeHousers hear this discussion between Bill Cash and Stephen Pound on whether the left or the right have the most attractive politicians? It was inspired by a recent Swedish research report that came down in favour of the latter. You can read the whole thing at this link – but, seeing as it’s the weekend, I thought a summary might be in order. So here, to help you form an opinion on this most crucial of issues, are four points taken from its pages. Whether their generalisations are correct or not is another matter entirely:
1) The right is better looking. The report dwells, for a whole host of technical reasons, on the 2004 municipal – aka local – elections in Finland. It reviews around 8,00 candidates, and comes up with the following table. As I understand it, the higher the number under the “Beauty” column, the better looking the candidates are perceived to be. Likewise for the “Competence” column, although that’s for how competent the candidates look, obviously:
2) Good-looking right wing candidates benefit more from their looks. The report goes on to construct a “beauty coefficient,” which aims to capture how much successful candidates benefitted, in terms of votes, from their good looks. As it puts it, “in the municipal elections, the beauty coefficient of right candidates is between two and four times as large as that of left candidates.”
3) Looks matter more in local elections. The report also looks at Finland’s 2003 national elections. Here, it seems, the right-wing candidates are better looking than their
leftwing counterparts – but by a smaller margin. And looks matter less to a candidate’s potential success, too.
4) What might explain it all? Quite a lot, it seems, but here’s the key explanatory passage from the report:
CoffeeHousers, the comments section is yours.“Our preferred explanation is that voters use beauty as an informational cue when evaluating candidates. If right voters expect better-looking candidates to be closer to them ideologically, then the beauty premium should be higher on the right. On the basis of the Price et al. (2001) findings, one possibility is that beauty serves as an indication of non-egalitarianism a political stance typically associated with sympathizers of the political right. It could also be that voters on the right, compared to voters on the left, consider beauty a stronger indication of candidate quality. Both of these explanations clarify why the partisan difference is present only at the municipal level. How so? At that level, voters have less certain information about candidates’ true degree of non-egalitarianism or quality, which is why they rely on thin slices of information to assess candidates. Hence, voters do not know much about challengers but are easily able to observe how they look. Thus voters tend to give a large weight to facial appearance when comparing challengers in the municipal elections. In the parliamentary election an additional piece of information becomes available about most challengers: their behavior in municipal office. With this information available voters reduce the weight given to facial appearance,”
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