The right look: Conservative politicians look better and voters reward it

2016/12/21 by Niclas Berggren, Henrik Jordahl, Panu Poutvaara · 1 citation
Psychology · Social Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · #Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification #Beauty #Conservatism #Redistribution (election) #Economics #Competition (biology) #Politics #Political economy #Political science #Law

paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2016.12.008

openalex publication_date 2016/12/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

Since good-looking politicians win more votes, a beauty advantage for politicians on the left or on the right is bound to have political consequences. We show that politicians on the right look more beautiful in Europe, the United States and Australia. Our explanation is that beautiful people earn more, which makes them less inclined to support redistribution. Our model of within-party competition predicts that voters use beauty as a cue for conservatism when they do not know much about candidates and that politicians on the right benefit more from beauty in low-information elections. Evidence from real and experimental elections confirms both predictions.

Citations

• Ballot Paper Photographs and Low-Information Elections in Ireland
• What’s Left and Who’s Right? A Q-method Study of Individual and Contextual Influences on the Meaning of Ideological Labels
• The Heritability of Partisan Attachment
• Maxims or myths of beauty? A meta-analytic and theoretical review.
• An Economic Model of Representative Democracy
• Heuristic Decision Making
• Neural Bases of Motivated Reasoning: An fMRI Study of Emotional Constraints on Partisan Political Judgment in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election
• Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?
• Expressive Political Behaviour: Foundations, Scope and Implications
• Political conservatism as motivated social cognition.
• The Evolutionary Psychology of Facial Beauty
• Advantages and Disadvantages of Cognitive Heuristics in Political Decision Making
• Face Value? Experimental Evidence that Candidate Appearance Influences Electoral Choice
• Is There a “Party” in Your Genes?

Cited by

• Halo effect [wikipedia]