IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/iza/izawol/journl2017n370.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

How do candidates’ looks affect their election chances?

Author

Listed:
  • Panu Poutvaara

    (University of Munich, Ifo Institute, and IZA, Germany)

Abstract

Good-looking political candidates win more votes around the world. This holds for both male and female candidates. Candidate appearance may be especially important for uninformed voters, as it is easy to observe. Voters may favor good-looking candidates because they expect them to be more competent or persuasive, but it can also be that voters simply enjoy laying their eyes on beautiful politicians. As politicians on the right have been deemed more attractive in Europe, the US, and Australia, the importance of beauty in politics favors conservative parties. A related finding is that voters use beauty as a cue for conservatism.

Suggested Citation

  • Panu Poutvaara, 2017. "How do candidates’ looks affect their election chances?," IZA World of Labor, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), pages 370-370, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izawol:journl:2017:n:370
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/370/pdfs/howdocandidateslooksaffecttheirelectionchances.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://wol.iza.org/articles/howdocandidateslooksaffecttheirelectionchances
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Raymundo M. Campos‐Vazquez & Carolina Rivas‐Herrera, 2021. "The Color of Electoral Success: Estimating the Effect of Skin Tone on Winning Elections in Mexico," Social Science Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 102(2), pages 844-864, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    beauty; elections; political candidates; inequality;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iza:izawol:journl:2017:n:370. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaade.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.