The Face of Political Beliefs: Why Gender Matters for Electability

Ahreum Maeng and Pankaj Aggarwal

Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2022, vol. 7, issue 3, 360 - 370

Abstract: The facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) of a person is associated with dominance and leadership. Our research examines the extent to which a perceiver’s political orientation biases their judgment of a political candidate’s electability based on the candidate’s facial characteristics, and stereotypes associated with the gender of the candidate. Four studies suggest that although fWHR is positively correlated with dominance evaluations of male faces, the same attribution is less likely to be made for female faces. Furthermore, political conservatives show stronger bias than liberals against female faces and are also less likely to elect female candidates associated with lower dominance. Finally, although liberals show greater intentions to vote for females than for males, high fWHR has little effect on voters’ perceptions of females’ electability regardless of their political orientation.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/719579 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/719579 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
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:ucp:jacres:doi:10.1086/719579

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the Association for Consumer Research from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().