When the Party Decides: The Effects of Facial Competence and Dominance on Internal Nominations of Political Candidates

• Published in: Evolutionary psychology 2018-04, Vol.16 (2), p.1474704917732005
• Main Authors: Laustsen, Lasse, Petersen, Michael Bang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adult; Candidates; Denmark; Election results; Facial Recognition - physiology; Female; Humans; Local elections; Local Government; Male; Nominations; Politics; Social Dominance; Social Perception; Special Issue: Evolution and Politics
• ISSN: 1474-7049; 1474-7049
• DOI: 10.1177/1474704917732005

The facial traits and appearance of political candidates have been found to predict election outcomes across countries with different electoral systems and institutions. Research over the last decade has provided two different versions of this overall conclusion. First and most thoroughly studied, candidates who from their mere faces are evaluated as more competent get more votes on Election Day. Second, recent research finds that the ideological leanings of candidates and the voters they cater to also matter: Right-wing and conservative candidates receive more votes if they look more dominant, while liberal candidates lose votes when looking dominant and masculine. In this article, we investigate whether these patterns extend to candidate selection and support within parties as determined by party organizations. We test this through an original combination of naive respondents’ trait ratings of candidates in Danish local elections and these candidates’ positions on the ballot as decided by nomination processes within local party organizations. The results strongly support that the conclusions in previous studies extend to dynamics within the party among party members: Danish local party organizations tend to nominate facially competent candidates at the top of the ballot regardless of their ideological leaning. Moreover, liberal and conservative parties position dominant-looking candidates significantly different on the ballot with liberal parties being less likely to assign facially dominant candidates to top ballot positions. These results add important new insights about the underlying psychological processes causing appearance-based voting and relate to the ongoing discussion about the quality of public opinion formation.