FlashReportsFaces of politicians: Babyfacedness predicts inferred competence but not electoral success
Section snippets
Survey and dataset
Our dataset is based on a web survey with 2772 respondents and includes perceptions of several traits, for example babyfacedness, competence, beauty and trustworthiness, as well as a measure of relative electoral success, defined as a candidate’s votes divided by the average number of votes for all candidates on the list. Each respondent evaluated four randomly chosen candidate photographs from the election campaign (two of each gender). The respondents were informed that they would evaluate
The variables
Our four trait variables babyfacedness, competence, beauty, and trustworthiness are constructed in two steps. First we compute the mean of all judgments of a particular photograph for each trait. From this measure we subtract, for each trait, the mean judgment for the candidates on the same list. Thus, the trait variables are relative measures, capturing how babyfaced, competent, beautiful, and trustworthy a candidate is perceived to be in relation to the competitors on the same list.
The
The Finnish political system
Finland has a unicameral parliament with 200 MPs, and a proportional electoral system. Voters have to vote for one particular candidate. In each district, parties present lists of their candidates. The legislature seats of a district are allocated based on party vote shares and personal votes, using the d’Hondt seat-allocation rule. With this rule, the total number of seats allocated to each list depends on the vote totals of all competing lists. Inside the list, the order in which candidates
Results and discussion
The Zebrowitz and Montepare (2005) conjecture that babyfacedness is an underlying predictor of electoral success is not supported by our data. This is evident already when looking at correlation coefficients from the parliamentary election. Although the correlation coefficient between babyfacedness and electoral success is negative, it is small and statistically insignificant (−.06; p = .12) see Fig. 1 for an illustration and in fact zero when controlling for age.
Acknowledgements
All authors contributed equally to the paper. Financial support was provided by the Torsten and Ragnar Söderberg Foundations (Berggren and Jordahl) and the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation (Poutvaara). We thank Coren Apicella, David Cesarini, Mikael Elinder, Maisa Halko, Erik Lindqvist, and Alexander Todorov for helpful comments and suggestions.
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