Voters vote beautiful: The effect of physical appearance on a national election

Judges ratings of physical appearance were obtained for 79 candidates who had competed for 21 parliamentary seats during the 1972 Canadian federal election. A comparison was made between the number of votes obtained by attractive and unattractive candidates. As predicted, the results indicate that attractive candidates averaged more votes than unattractive ones (32% vs 11%, p < 0. 001). An unexpected finding was that the politically unpopular parties were represented by physically unattractive candidates. Only a single member of the political fringe groups obtained an appearance score which was above the median for the entire group (p = 0.0001). Several possible causes of the relation between party affiliation and appearance were discussed.