Journal Articles

Looking Like a Winner: Candidate Appearance and Electoral Success in New Democracies

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A flurry of recent studies indicates that candidates who simply look more capable or attractive are more likely to win elections. In this article, the authors investigate whether voters’ snap judgments of appearance travel across cultures and whether they influence elections in new democracies. They 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. These effects, the results also suggest, may depend on the rules of the electoral game, with institutions exacerbating or mitigating the effects of appearance.

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Detail Information

Series Title

WORLD POLITICS

Call Number

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Publisher

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press., 2010

Collation

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Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

00438871

Classification

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Content Type

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Media Type

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Carrier Type

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Edition

Vol. 62, No. 4 October 2010.pp. 561-593

Subject(s)

Elections
New democracies

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