Beauty Premium in Politics? Perceptions and Political Behaviour

Abstract

Politics is a social endeavour and highly visible to the consumer (i.e. the citizen or constituent). It is therefore not surprising that a potential beauty premium in politics has been explored. However, most studies have focused on how beauty affects the success of candidates running for office. Whether beauty predicts the behaviour of incumbent politicians has remained unexplored. In this paper, we examine whether beauty exacerbates the principal-agent problem in politics for incumbent politicians by asking Australian survey participants to rate images of unfamiliar Swiss politicians. First, we show that beauty does not increase rent-seeking by politicians: exploiting mandatory disclosure of lobbying affiliations, we find that better-looking politicians are no more likely to be captured by interest groups. Second, we also find that better-looking politicians are no more likely to ignore the preferences of their constituents: beauty does not increase politicians’ decisions to vote differently from their constituents on identically worded legislative proposals, i.e., the representation quality of constituents’ interest is not affected by beauty. Both results tend to hold for left, right and centrist politicians, suggesting that the insignificance of the beauty premium for incumbent politicians is likely universal. There is some evidence that more beautiful politicians from the centre are less congruent with their party, i.e. diverge more from their party line.

Keywords: D72, J30, J45, J70