EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Election systems, the “beauty premium” in politics, and the beauty of dissent

Niklas Potrafke, Marcus Rösch and Heinrich Ursprung

European Journal of Political Economy, 2020, vol. 64, issue C

Abstract: We ask three questions. First, do election systems differ in how they translate physical attractiveness of candidates into electoral success? Second, do political parties strategically exploit the “beauty premium” when deciding on which candidates to nominate, and, third, do elected MPs use their beauty premium to reap some independence from their party? Using the German election system that combines first-past-the-post election with party-list proportional representation, our results show that plurality elections provide more scope for translating physical attractiveness into electoral success than proportional representation. Whether political parties strategically use the beauty premium to optimize their electoral objectives is less clear. Physically attractive MPs, however, allow themselves to dissent more often, i.e. they vote more often against the party line than their less attractive peers.

Keywords: Attractiveness of politicians; Safe district; Party strategies; Electoral success; Electoral system (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 J45 J70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0176268020300483
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Election Systems, the "Beauty Premium" in Politics, and the Beauty of Dissent (2020) Downloads
Working Paper: Election Systems, the “Beauty Premium” in Politics, and the Beauty of Dissent (2020) Downloads
Working Paper: Election systems, the "beauty premium" in politics, and the beauty of dissent (2020)
Working Paper: Election systems, the “beauty premium” in politics, and the beauty of dissent (2020) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:poleco:v:64:y:2020:i:c:s0176268020300483

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2020.101900

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Political Economy is currently edited by J. De Haan, A. L. Hillman and H. W. Ursprung

More articles in European Journal of Political Economy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:eee:poleco:v:64:y:2020:i:c:s0176268020300483