Faces of politicians: Babyfacedness predicts inferred competence but not electoral success

Panu Poutvaara, Henrik Jordahl and Niclas Berggren

Munich Reprints in Economics from University of Munich, Department of Economics

Abstract: Recent research has documented that competent-looking political candidates do better in US elections and that babyfaced individuals are generally perceived to be less competent than maturefaced individuals. Taken together, this suggests that babyfaced political candidates are perceived as less competent and therefore fare worse in elections. We test this hypothesis, making use of photograph-based judgments by 2772 respondents of the facial appearance of 1785 Finnish political candidates. Our results confirm that babyfacedness is negatively related to inferred competence in politics. Despite this, babyfacedness is either unrelated or positively related to electoral success, depending on the sample of candidates.

Date: 2009
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Published in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 5 45(2009): pp. 1132-1135

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Related works:
Working Paper: Faces of Politicians: Babyfacedness Predicts Inferred Competence but Not Electoral Success (2009)
Working Paper: Faces of politicians: Babyfacedness predicts inferred competence but not electoral success (2009)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lmu:muenar:19800

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