engleski

Politicians' facial width-to-heigth ratio is not related to voting behavior: a real world study

Influence of facial features in social cognition and perception has been widely established across multiple domains of psychology and other disciplines. Moreover, it has been shown that the effects of facial features play a role in an election process. For example, candidates whose faces were perceived as more competent stand a better chance of winning the elecetion. Researchers interested in the evolutionary background of the leadership also showed that politicians whose faces were perceived as more masculine or dominant were favorable, especially under threat of out-group conflict or among more conservative voters. However, research on the influence of politicians' facial morphology in relation to election outcome is lacking. Hence, we examined if a simple and widely used measure, a facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR), plays a role during actual elections. fWHR is assumed to be related to testosterone levels, and faces with greater fWHR should be perceived as more masculine, dominant and threatening. Therefore, we assumed that politicians with larger fWHR would have a better chance of winning the elections. To test this assumption, we used the dataset from an already published research that contained faces of candidates in US gubernatorial and Senate elections, as well as election results, political affiliation, sex and race of the candidates. fWHR was calculated for a total of 262 white, male candidates, and used as a predictor of an election outcome, and the candidate's vote share. Results showed that fWHR predicts neither election outcome, nor the candidate's vote share across several logistic and linear regression analyses. Also, the interaction of candidate's fWHR and political affiliation was not a significant predictor of an election outcome. These results imply that fWHR does not contribute to success in actual elections, which is interpreted in the context of ongoing debate on validity of fWHR.

Politicians ; fWHR ; voting

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