Kyle Mattes
Pretty faces, marginal races: Predicting election outcomes using trait assessments of British parliamentary candidates
Mattes, Kyle; Milazzo, Caitlin
Abstract
The conventional wisdom on Western European politics leads us to believe that all the "action" lies with parties, because the unified parliamentary delegations in Western Europe draw voters' attention to parties' policies and images. Though British elections take place under a single member district plurality system, British parties, like their continental counterparts, are highly centralised and feature disciplined parliamentary delegations. Despite the strong ties between British candidates and their parties, we demonstrate that perceptions of candidates' personal attributes can be used to predict general election outcomes. Using a computer-based survey where subjects are asked to evaluate real British candidates using only rapidly determined first impressions of facial images, we successfully predict outcomes from the 2010 general election. Moreover, we find that perceptions of candidates' relative attractiveness are particularly useful for predicting outcomes in marginal constituencies. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.
Citation
Mattes, K., & Milazzo, C. (2014). Pretty faces, marginal races: Predicting election outcomes using trait assessments of British parliamentary candidates. Electoral Studies, 34, 177-189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2013.11.004
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Nov 14, 2013 |
Online Publication Date | Nov 26, 2013 |
Publication Date | 2014-06 |
Deposit Date | Jul 29, 2016 |
Publicly Available Date | Jul 29, 2016 |
Journal | Electoral Studies |
Print ISSN | 0261-3794 |
Electronic ISSN | 1873-6890 |
Publisher | Elsevier |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 34 |
Pages | 177-189 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2013.11.004 |
Keywords | British Elections, Candidate Traits, Electoral Competition |
Public URL | https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/730713 |
Publisher URL | http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379413001819 |
Contract Date | Jul 29, 2016 |
Files
Pretty Faces Marginal Races (07-08-13).pdf
(536 Kb)
PDF
Copyright Statement
Copyright information regarding this work can be found at the following address: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
You might also like
Social diversity affects the number of parties even under first-past-the-post rule
(2017)
Journal Article
Taking back control?: investigating the role of immigration in the 2016 vote for Brexit
(2017)
Journal Article
The face of the party? Leadership personalisation in British campaigns
(2017)
Journal Article
Downloadable Citations
About Repository@Nottingham
Administrator e-mail: discovery-access-systems@nottingham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search