Abstract
According to numerous studies, candidates’ looks predict voters’ choices—a finding that raises concerns about voter competence and about the quality of elected officials. This potentially worrisome finding, however, is observational and therefore vulnerable to alternative explanations. To better test the appearance effect, we conducted two experiments. Just before primary and general elections for various offices, we randomly assigned voters to receive ballots with and without candidate photos. Simply showing voters these pictures increased the vote for appearance-advantaged candidates. Experimental evidence therefore supports the view that candidates’ looks could influence some voters. In general elections, we find that high-knowledge voters appear immune to this influence, while low-knowledge voters use appearance as a low-information heuristic. In primaries, however, candidate appearance influences even high-knowledge and strongly partisan voters.
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Notes
Several other observational results are inconsistent with the alternative explanation emphasizing the causal influence of campaign effort entirely explaining the observed effect of candidate appearance. Specifically, the effect of the candidate’s appearance holds when professional photographers took the pictures in a standard format (Antonakis and Dalgas 2009; Klein and Rosar 2005), and when one statistically controls for differences in image quality and other aspects of the pictures, such as visible light (Lawson et al. 2010; Rosar et al. 2008). Additionally, appearance-advantaged candidates win in competitive races, where the candidates should be more comparable in quality and in resources (Antonakis and Dalgas 2009; Benjamin and Shapiro 2009). They also perform disproportionately well in systems where legislators compete against members of the same party (Berggren et al. 2010) and in non-partisan contests (Banducci et al. 2008; Martin 1978).
In general, researchers should not control for variables that intervene between the treatment and the outcome, in this case, between candidate appearance and vote share. For a general discussion, see King (1991, 1049–50).
When estimating the effect of challenger appearance, Atkinson et al. (2009) carefully try to avoid post-treatment bias by measuring district competitiveness at least 1 year before the general election, when the challenger's identity is less clear (using the Cook Political Report). Nevertheless, these experts may already know the likely challengers and so may be influenced by their looks (making these ratings post-treatment).
Indeed, Atkinson et al. (2009, 236) are careful not to interpret their regression coefficient for incumbent appearance as a causal estimate. They suggest instead that appearance-advantaged incumbents (as challengers in a prior election) disproportionately select into competitive districts, which would bias their estimate of incumbent appearance downwards. This downward bias and, more generally, the causal complexity of observational studies on appearance provide reasons to turn to experimental studies such as ours.
Of course, candidates’ efforts to “improve” their appearance, as revealed through their photos, may contribute to any such causal effects.
We also ran the experiment in six California State Senate races. We do not pool these races with the House primaries in the analysis because photograph quality was noticeably lower. Instead, we present these results in OA section 1.2. Including them in the main analysis leaves our key findings unchanged.
No matter what measure of appearance we choose, that measure will also pick up other characteristics that correlate with it. One way to break these correlations would be to artificially alter candidate photos in order to experimentally vary these traits, but using altered photos would significantly reduce the external validity of our experiments. We thus use actual candidate photos and make no claim about the particular aspect of a candidate’s appearance that influences voters.
The authors and a team of research assistants used endorsements, campaign finance data, previous office, number of competing co-partisans, and vote share in previous elections to classify candidates as viable or nonviable before the election. These assessments were largely holistic but are validated by the actual election results: A nonviable-classified candidate finished ahead of a viable-classified candidate in just 2 of the 13 races under study here, and neither of those candidates came close to advancing to the general election.
Ideally, we would address race and gender not with controls but by restricting the analysis to candidates matched on race and gender, but only three of the 14 races in Study 1 were so matched. We are, however, able to conduct this analysis in the second study.
Finally, to address separate concerns about candidate vote share not being independently distributed within district, OA section 4.6 shows that the photo-ballot respondents were 10 percentage points more likely to vote for the most appearance-advantaged candidate in their district compared to control ballot respondents (p < 0.001).
Survey dates: October 17-November 2. Election Day was November 6. We also asked participants about a handful of multicandidate races and single-candidate judicial retention elections. Since analyzing races with only one or more than two candidates introduces complications, we relegate analysis of these races to the OA (see OA section 5.1). The results are consistent with the overall findings in the paper.
Research has found differential effects of candidate appearance where one or both candidates are female (Chiao et al. 2008; Poutvaara et al. 2009). Unfortunately, we lack a sufficient number of races to shed further light on this topic (half of the races are male-male and the other half are mostly female-male races).
Another interpretation of the finding is that candidate age—as discerned from the pictures—influences treated participants to change their votes. Previous studies, however, have found that controlling for age, using various functional forms, leaves the appearance-vote relationship unchanged (Lawson et al. 2010, 581; Todorov et al. 2005).
Several classroom and lab studies have conducted experiments on appearance effects (e.g.,Johns and Shephard 2007; Rosenberg and McCafferty 1987; Spezio et al. 2008). Our experiment builds on these by examining whether candidate appearance can influence real-world voters' decisions in actual elections.
We also tested for over time patterns in Study 1. Since we conducted Study 1 over fewer days and since primary campaigns usually pale in comparison to general election campaigns, we might not expect to see such patterns, which is what we find.
We estimate this by multiplying candidate appearance advantage by the appearance effect reported in Column 1 of Table 2, adding the constant to the outcome, and then subtracting that result from the candidate’s actual vote share in the 2012 election.
We use linear probability models because they are consistent under weak assumptions and the estimates are simpler to interpret, especially with interaction terms (Ai and Norton 2003).
In OA sections 4.3–4.5, we find evidence that strong partisanship can diminish the appearance effect, especially among high-knowledge individuals. We find this in downballot races (no senatorial and gubernatorial races) and when we substitute local for general knowledge.
Unpublished work by one of the authors finds that competent looking incumbents are no more effective in Congress, nor are they evaluated as being more effective by peers in the North Carolina legislature (see OA section 6).
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Acknowledgments
We thank Luke Edwards, Aaron Kaufman, Aidan McCarthy, Tony Valeriano, and Kelsey White for research assistance and students in the fall 2012 Presidential Elections and Democratic Accountability class for help collecting candidate photos and candidate knowledge questions. We are also grateful for comments from David Doherty, Laura Stoker, conference participants at the 2013 Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting and the 2013 West Coast Experiments Conference at Stanford University, and research workshop participants at both the University of California, Berkeley and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Finally, we thank the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley for funding. Replication code and data is available from https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/facevalue.
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The studies were approved by the Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects (CPHS) at the University of California, Berkeley. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of CPHS and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Ahler, D.J., Citrin, J., Dougal, M.C. et al. Face Value? Experimental Evidence that Candidate Appearance Influences Electoral Choice. Polit Behav 39, 77–102 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-016-9348-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-016-9348-6