How Large is the Beauty Premium in Politics?
Politics is a social endeavour and highly visible to the consumer (in this case, the citizen). It is therefore not surprising that a potential beauty premium has been explored in politics. However, most studies have focused on how beauty influences the success of candidates running for office, this is a distributive outcome rather than a process or productivity insight. In this paper, we examine whether beauty helps to understand how politicians act or behave once already elected into office, by exploiting two unique features of Swiss politics: publicly-available politician and constituent referenda voting records and mandatory disclosure of lobby group affiliations. We asked Australian survey participants to rate images of unknown-to-them Swiss politicians and find that politicians deemed as more beautiful are also perceived as more trustworthy (honest) and qualified (competent). Next, we check for politician-voter congruence by matching each politician’s voting record to that of their constituents on identically worded legislative proposals. We show that beauty does not influence the politicians’ decisions to defect from constituents’ preferences. Second, we find that beauty (in general) does not influence the decision to affiliate with interest groups. However, the interaction effects with beauty along partisan lines indicate some leveraging of physical attractiveness for labour market success/addition side incomes by Left-leaning politicians (relative to Centre-leaning politicians). Our results suggest that (with respect to the actual behaviour of politicians) the ‘beauty premium’ is either non-existent or context-dependent in politics, at least for already elected politicians
Year of publication: |
2023
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Authors: | Bickley, Steven J. ; Chan, Ho Fai ; Skali, Ahmed ; Stadelmann, David ; Torgler, Benno ; Whyte, Stephen |
Publisher: |
[S.l.] : SSRN |
Saved in:
freely available
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