Beautiful Politicians

Are beautiful politicians more likely to be elected? To test this, we use evidence from Australia, a country in which voting is compulsory, and in which voters are given ‘How to Vote’ cards depicting photos of the major party candidates as they arrive to vote. Using raters chosen to be representative of the electorate, we assess the beauty of political candidates from major political parties, and then estimate the effect of beauty on voteshare for candidates in the 2004 federal election. Beautiful candidates are indeed more likely to be elected, with a one standard deviation increase in beauty associated with a 1½ – 2 percentage point increase in voteshare. Our results are robust to several specification checks: adding party fixed effects, dropping well-known politicians, using a non-Australian beauty rater, omitting candidates of non-Anglo Saxon appearance, controlling for age, and analyzing the ‘beauty gap’ between candidates running in the same electorate. The marginal effect of beauty is larger for male candidates than for female candidates, and appears to be approximately linear. Consistent with the theory that returns to beauty reflect discrimination, we find suggestive evidence that beauty matters more in electorates with a higher share of apathetic voters.高颜值政客是否更易当选？为验证这一研究假说，本研究依托澳大利亚选举数据展开实证分析。澳大利亚实行强制性投票制度，选民前往投票站投票时，可领取标注有主要政党候选人照片的"How to Vote"投票指引卡。我们选取具有选民代表性的评分者，对主要政党政治候选人的外貌颜值进行评分，进而估算2004年澳大利亚联邦大选中，候选人颜值对其得票率的影响效应。研究结果表明，高颜值候选人确实更具当选优势：颜值每提升1个标准差，得票率将提高1.5至2个百分点。本研究通过多项设定检验证实了结论的稳健性，包括加入政党固定效应、剔除知名政客样本、使用非澳大利亚籍评分者、排除非盎格鲁-撒克逊外貌特征的候选人、控制年龄变量，以及分析同一选区内候选人之间的"颜值差距"。颜值对男性候选人的边际正向效应显著高于女性候选人，且二者关联大致呈线性特征。与"颜值回报源于歧视行为"的理论假说相一致，本研究获得提示性证据显示：在选民冷漠占比更高的选区，颜值对候选人得票的影响更为显著。