Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/102245 
Year of Publication: 
2014
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 4857
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
Economic research shows that candidates have a higher chance of getting (re-)elected when they have the luck that the world economy does well even though this is beyond their control and unrelated to their competence. Psychological research demonstrates that candidates increase their chances if they have the right looks, a facial characteristic that is also unrelated to a politician's actual policies. We combine these two strands of literature by assessing the relative strength of luck and looks. Moreover, we take the moderating effect of the electoral system into account. Using a sample of 196 elections for 44 countries between 1979-1999, results show that looks matter only in majority systems whereas luck ceases to be relevant at all. Economic competence does matter in representative systems. These results hold after controlling for the interaction of luck, looks and competence with variables that proxy for the cross-country variation in the well-informedness of voters.
Subjects: 
elections
economics
economic growth
psychology
faces
electoral systems
JEL: 
H30
E60
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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