Good-Looking Candidates

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As candidates are recruited for the 2010 midterms, should the parties be seeking out the hottest candidates? Or, rather, how much should candidate attractiveness factor into which candidate a party chooses to run? All things being equal, of course, one would have to guess a better-looking candidate has a better chance than an uggo. But how much does a candidate’s face matter?

Here’s one attempt to answer the question (PDF here):

We estimate the effect of candidate appearance on vote choice in congressional elections using an original survey instrument. Based on estimates of the facial competence of 972 congressional candidates, we show that in more competitive races the out-party tends to run candidates with higher quality faces.We estimate the direct effect of face on vote choice when controlling for the competitiveness of the contest and for individual partisanship. Combining survey data with our facial quality scores and a measure of contest competitiveness, we find a face quality effect for Senate challengers of about 4 points for independent voters and 1–3 points for partisans. While we estimate face effects that could potentially matter in close elections, we find that the challenging candidate’s face is never the difference between a challenger and incumbent victory in all 99 Senate elections in our study.

So, the effect wasn’t enough to flip any of the races in this study’s sample, but — contra The Monkey Cage — I’m not sure I’d call 4 points among Independents all that “modest.” The same goes for 1-3 points among partisans.

Still, Chris Christie just got elected governor of New Jersey. So, I guess all bets are off.