Overcoming Bias

Share this post

Pretty Pols Win

www.overcomingbias.com

Pretty Pols Win

Robin Hanson
Nov 8, 2009
Share this post

Pretty Pols Win

www.overcomingbias.com

More evidence suggesting Politics Isn’t About Policy:

Beautiful candidates are indeed more likely to be elected, with a one standard deviation increase in beauty associated with a 1 ½– 2 percentage point increase in voteshare. Our results are robust to several specification checks: adding party fixed effects, dropping well-known politicians, using non-Australian beauty raters, omitting candidates of non-Anglo 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. … 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.

Share this post

Pretty Pols Win

www.overcomingbias.com
Comments
TopNewCommunity

No posts

Ready for more?

© 2023 Robin Hanson
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start WritingGet the app
Substack is the home for great writing