Welcome to the latest in our occasional series highlighting interesting findings from academic research. Today it’s the electoral appeal of physical appeal:
The work by the University of Exeter and the University Iowa found that the “halo effect” of attractiveness was most prominent in hotly contested constituencies.
Researchers found in those seats the most attractive candidate wins nearly three quarters of the time.
Dr Caitlin Milazzo, a lecturer in politics at Exeter, said choosing attractive candidates could give a party the “edge”.
“While our findings certainly do not indicate that unattractive candidates are unelectable, they do suggest that an attractiveness “advantage” may come into play…
Dr Milazzo chose 75 pairs of same sex, same race candidates from the 2010 British general election who came first and second in the eventual vote.
Their pictures were then flashed up to 153 volunteers in the US and they were asked who was the more attractive.
The results from the beauty contest was then matched up to the actual election results.
Dr Milazzo found that attractiveness correlated to victory in slightly over half the results overall.
But in marginal seats – where a swing of five per cent or less could secure victory – it was much higher at 72 per cent.
This particular piece of research comes with obvious caveats given the details above. It does however also chime with previous research, conducted in different ways yet coming to the same general conclusion.
So that’s an attractive, local, not rich person whose name begins with A that research points to…
* Mark Pack is Party President and is the editor of Liberal Democrat Newswire.
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5 Comments
This looks like garbage.
Statistically, you would expect that a person selecting a candidate at random would get the winning candidate half the time. So the fact that “attractiveness correlated to victory in slightly over half the results overall” means there is NO CAUSAL LINK AT ALL between beauty and winning. You would get teh same result from random selection.
Out of those 75 pairs, how many were deemed “marginal”? Suppose there were 12. This would mean that a random selection would have gotten, on averae, 6 winners, but the 75% “correlation” appears to suggest that 9 were found. BUT, with such a small sample, there is always a chance that a random selection ends up selecting something that is not the average. See the proof of the Central Limit Theorem in any advanced statistics text book.
What matters is not the apparent correlation, but the confidence levels in the apparent correlation. Dr Millazo needs to read a text book on how to use statistics in social science.
On what basis were the 75 pairs chosen by Dr. Milazzo?
As a bearded person (please note that while I do own a pair of sandals, I don’t wear them canvassing or at meetings) I find this very encouraging when I look at the results in Somerton and Frome. Clearly David Heath’s repeated cheating of the axe is down to the aphrodisiac effect of beards and not to his hard constituency work.
The shallowness of pandering to the allur of attractiveness is what has brought politics to its low regard by the general populace.
Do the people of Scotland have a leader who is attractiveness personified? Does that stop Mr Salmond from getting the SNP message across?
Putting boyish good looks and charisma above policy ends up with the public booing Prime MInisters and Chancellors – take note.
I remember the late Robin Cook decided not to stand for the leader of the Labour party because he thought he was too ugly. Yet he is probably the greatest leader Labour never had in modern times.