Nonicoclolasos

The Economist skriver för andra gången om min, Henrik Jordahls och Panu Poutvaaras forskning om skönhetens betydelse i politiken:

Lo and behold, the more beautiful candidates, as ranked by people who knew nothing of Finland’s internal politics, tended to have been the more successful—though in this case, unlike Dr Hamermesh’s economic results, the effect was larger for women than for men.

Den tidigare artikeln återfinns här; och vår mest aktuella version av uppsatsen återfinns här. Abstract:

We study the role of beauty in politics using candidate photos that figured prominently in electoral campaigns. Our investigation is based on visual assessments of 1,929 Finnish political candidates from 10,011 respondents (of which 3,708 were Finnish). As Finland has a proportional electoral system with a relatively large number of female candidates, we are able to perform a systematic study of gender differences, and to compare the electoral success of non-incumbent candidates representing the same party. An increase in beauty by one standard deviation is associated with an increase of 17–20% in the number of votes for the average non-incumbent candidate. The relationship is virtually always statistically significant for female candidates, and in most specifications also for male candidates. When interpreting our results, we also evaluate alternative explanations of why beauty matters.