Beauty itself doth of itself persuade: A cross-cultural study of candidate appearance and electoral success in new democracies
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Lenz_Beauty Itself.pdf
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Author(s)
Lenz, Gabriel Salman
Lawson, J. Chappell H.
Baker, Andy
Myers, Michael
Date Issued
October 2010
Journal
World Politics
Publisher
Princeton University
Citation
Lawson, Chappell et al. “Looking Like a Winner: Candidate Appearance and Electoral Success in New Democracies.” World Politics 62.04 (2010): 561–593.
Version
Author's final manuscript
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, we investigate whether voters‘ snap judgments of
appearance travel across cultures and whether they influence elections in new democracies. We
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. We
still find, however, a role for more traditional institutional variables, as the magnitude of the
appearance effects may depend on the rules of the electoral game.
Description
Author's final manuscript of an article that got renamed during publication to "Looking Like a Winner: Candidate Appearance and Electoral Success in New Democracies." Final published version available: http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/70919
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Political Science
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Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887110000195
