Beautiful people enjoy a range of benefits in life above and beyond the sheer joy of looking in the mirror. Previous research has found that beauty influences popularity, grades in school, and salary, reports the Washington Post. So it might not be too far a stretch to suggest that beauty plays a role in politics, too. One team of scientists posited that because beautiful people make more money, which makes them "less inclined to support redistribution," it would follow that they'd tend to be more conservative as well. Reporting in the Journal of Public Economics, they say their latest research confirms this.
First, researchers showed participants photos of political candidates in Finland, the European Parliament, Australia's House of Representatives, and the US Senate as well as candidates for state governorship. People rated candidates on a 5-point scale, and on all three continents the politicians on the right were rated more beautiful. They also found that without any other information, voters tend to assume that candidates with the so-called "right look" are conservative. Mediaite notes that in the US, the study found that Republicans cared more about candidates' looks than Democrats did, if those voters didn't have much more information about them. (When robots judged a beauty contest, charges of racism ensued.)
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