Masters Thesis

The influence of political candidates' facial competence on voter perception and behavioral intent

The present investigation aims to specifically address three problems underlying the relationship between facial competence and electoral success, (1) how facial competence influences longer-term perceptual measures like one’s overall impression of a candidate, and what one remembers about the candidate, (2) how a candidate’s competitor influences the degree to which a candidate’s competence is perceived, and (3) to establish what accounts for the mixed findings surrounding gender stereotypes in politics. Therefore we created a factorial dosing consisting of a 2 Candidate Gender (Male vs. Female) X 2 Candidate Competence (Low vs. High) X 2 Competitor Gender (Male vs. Female) fixed analysis of variance; systematically varying the independent variables to address all three problems underlying the relationship between facial competence and electoral success. Results indicated that all three of the problems we aimed to solve during our investigation had similar explanations of the influence of a candidate’s facial morphology revealing competence—the competitor. An interesting, and we believe important, finding emerging from the results of this investigation was that same-sex candidate pairings result in more negative perceptions and lower behavioral outcomes than different-sex candidate pairings—specifically female-female pairings. We reason that candidate context needs to be further considered—specifically, the complementary nature of gender biases with different-sex political pairings rather than same-sex political pairings.

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