What causes the beauty premium in elections? Two decades of research show that more physically attractive candidates get more votes. At the same time, voters’ evaluation of candidate appearance is closely connected to expectations about their gender and ethnicity. Most studies assume a direct link between voter evaluations of candidate appearance and electoral support, even though many voters may not have knowledge of how a candidate looks when they cast their ballot. We argue that the causal story is more complicated: good-looking candidates may get more votes in part because they raise more money. To evaluate our argument, we evaluate the facial attractiveness of candidates running for the 2019 (n = 1207) and 2021 (n = 1595) Canadian federal election using pretrained image classification models (Lindholm et al. 2024). Combined with existing datasets on candidate characteristics (e.g., gender, party affiliation, vote share, competitiveness of the election) and donations (number and amount of received donations as well as gender of each donor), this data allows us to model how attractiveness influences vote share both directly and indirectly via political donations. Data on donor gender also allows us to test expectations for gendered responses to candidate appearance. Results show a consistent pattern across both election years: more attractive candidates raise more money and garner higher vote shares. Mediation analyses suggest that a significant portion of the direct effect (20% and 30%) is accounted for by increased fundraising. Exploratory analyses show that while women and men candidates benefit similarly from attractiveness overall, more attractive men candidates are particularly likely to receive more donations from women donors. These findings challenge the simplistic view that the beauty premium presents solely a form of voter incompetence; instead, they indicate that attractiveness influences electoral outcomes through mechanisms embedded in the political campaign process.
