A whole array of studies has shown that the physical appearance of candidates running for elective office matters. However, it is unclear whether attractiveness or perceived competence is the source of such electoral advantage. In addition, the gender of candidates might interact with perceptions of physical appearance. With the help of Canadian student coders and through the use of a web-based survey, we measure the threefold link between physical attractiveness, perceived competence, and gender for all races in the 2008 U.S. House of Representatives elections. We find that both the attractiveness and perceived competence of candidates matter for candidates' electoral successes; the former having an important effect in intra-gender races and the latter in inter-gender races.

Objective We have two goals. First, we investigate both the short‐ and long‐term electoral impact of involvement in scandals on reelection margins of incumbents in U.S. congressional elections. Second, we evaluate the impact of scandals on district‐level turnout. Methods We model the impact of involvement in a political scandal on incumbents’ electoral margins in the election cycle in which the scandal comes to light, as well as in future election cycles. We also model the impact of scandal on district‐level turnout. Results Involvement in a scandal exerts not only an immediate, negative effect on incumbents’ margins, but one that also lingers beyond the initial reelection cycle. Elections involving incumbents embroiled in scandals experience a small boost in turnout. Conclusion In tandem, these results implicate the mobilization of previous nonvoters intent on “throwing the bum out” as one mechanism through which incumbent vote share is depressed in scandal elections.

Objective. In this article we show that physical attractiveness matters as a heuristic device for uninformed voters but not for politically savvy voters. Methods. Drawing on a two-step experiment, we first ask over 100 students to rank the physical attractiveness of candidates to the U.S. House of Representatives. Second, we create a treatment and a control group comprising each of 1,200 research different subjects. We ask the first group to indicate their vote choice by merely looking at the picture of candidates for the 2008 U.S. House of Representatives elections, while the second group has a picture and a detailed description of the political/professional competence of the contenders at their disposal. Results. We find that our first group of study subjects representing all those voters who are politically uninformed tend to cast their ballot for the better-looking candidate, whereas the second group, representing politically knowledgeable individuals, choose the more competent candidate. Conclusion. Our experimental study provides evidence that uninformed or politically unknowledgeable voters use political appearance as a heuristic device in casing their ballot at elections.The axiom "what is beautiful is good" applies to many social settings (Dion, Berscheid, and Walster, 1972:285). In human interactions, attractive individuals are immediately perceived as being more likeable and friendly (cf. Brewer and Archer, 2007). At the workplace, more attractive individuals gain a pay premium of up to 10 percent and are prone to advance their careers faster than less attractive employees (Hamermesh and Biddle, 1994). In politics, good-looking politicians are more likely to be nominated to executive positions at all levels in comparison to politicians who are perceived as less attractive (Ibrocheva, 2009). In elections, attractive candidates frequently get a vote premium of several percentage points solely based on their looks (Tsafati, Elfassi, and Weismiel-Manor, 2010;Hoegg and Lewis, 2011). But who are the voters for whom the physical appearance of candidates is a primary criterion in their votechoice? While some studies (e.g., Lenz and Lawson, 2011) entertain the possibility that uninformed voters use physical appearance as a heuristic device to make their vote choices, there is still some need for a study that empirically tests the relationship between physical attractiveness and vote choice in the presence of voters with low and high levels of information.To investigate whether uninformed individuals use physical attractiveness as an information shortcut more so than informed voters, we perform a two-step experiment. We first ask approximately 100 Canadian coders to rate the physical attractiveness of all contenders in more than 320 electoral contests for the 2008 congressional elections to the * Direct correspondence to Daniel Stockemer, School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 120 University (7076), Ottawa, K1N 6N5 daniel.stockemer@uottawa.ca . Data and coding information are available on request f...

While existing studies have shown that more attractive candidates running for office have an electoral advantage, very little has been written on how this advantage relates to different institutions. We theorise that formal institutions mediate the positive effect from which attractive candidates benefit. More in detail, we focus on the type of electoral system, hypothesising that physical attractiveness plays a more important role in majoritarian, first-past-the-post systems than in list proportional systems. We test this stipulation using the German federal elections’ two-tier electoral system, together with data collected in Australia on the physical attractiveness of German federal election candidates in 2013. A series of bivariate and multivariate statistics show that physical attractiveness is a significant factor explaining a candidate’s likelihood to win in the FPTP tier, but not in the list proportional representation (PR) tier.