Facial Dominance and Electoral Success in Times of War and Peace

Abstract

Do voters prefer dominant looking candidates in times of war? By replicating previous survey experiments, we find that respondents do prefer candidates with dominant facial features when war is salient. We then investigate whether these survey results generalize to the real world. Examining US Senate elections from 1990 to 2006, we test whether voters prefer candidates with dominant facial features in wartime elections more than in peacetime elections. In contrast with the survey studies, we find that dominant-looking candidates appear to gain a slight advantage in all elections but have no special advantage in wartime contexts. We discuss possible explanations for the discrepancy between the findings and conduct additional experiments to investigate one possible explanation: additional information about candidates may rapidly erode the wartime preference for dominant looking candidates. Overall, our findings suggest that the dominance-war findings may not generalize to the real world.