The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Do Attractive Politicians Get a 'Break' When They Are Involved in Scandals?

Recent scholarship focused on understanding the electoral success of individuals running for office in democratic regimes has unveiled two disconnected, yet interesting relationships. First, politicians involved in scandals usually pay a price in terms of public support. In fact, even those who run for re-election and ultimately emerge victorious tend to be penalised in terms of vote margins (cf. Doherty, Dowling and Miller 2011; Basinger 2013; Praino, Stockemer and Moscardelli 2013). Second, within a society that has become simultaneously more “visual,” and less educated and informed about politics, voters seem to utilise the physical appearance of candidates as a heuristic that helps them decide for whom to cast their ballot. Such behaviour translates into a vote premium of several percentage points for attractive politicians (cf. Rosar, Klein and Beckers 2008; Praino, Stockemer and Ratis 2014; Stockemer and Praino 2015). We propose to bridge these two distinct lines of inquiry by investigating whether the physical attractiveness of politicians involved in scandals affects their electoral fortunes. We hypothesize that, on average, attractive politicians involved in scandals will suffer smaller declines in their reelection margins than less attractive politicians. In other words, we posit that the positive feelings associated with trust, integrity and sympathy that attractiveness triggers in voters mediate or counteract the negative feelings associated with scandals that typically culminate in diminished electoral returns. We test this stipulation in a several-step research process using data on U.S. House of Representatives elections between 1972 and 2012. First, we identify all Members of Congress (MCs) over the past 50 years who were involved in a scandal. Second, we make use of the “truth-of-consensus method” and have naïve coders rank the physical attractiveness of these scandal-ridden MCs. Third, we estimate a multivariate model of electoral margins. Our results demonstrate that physical attractiveness mitigates the negative effects of scandals. Ultimately, this work has implications for democratic accountability, as it shows that voters employ different standards for the public conduct of their elected representatives based on their mere physical appearance.