Kiss, Marry, Kill: Appearance-Based Discrimination in Politics

Democracy is premised on voters’ ability to identify qualified candidates for office. However, extensive evidence suggests that candidate appearance has a non-trivial impact on voter decision-making. Social scientists often argue that the brain’s tendency to take cognitive shortcuts explains these phenomena, but this theory still fails to explain why the brain takes one shortcut over another. Weaving together experimental and observational evidence, I show that when visual cues are provided, voters rely on mental “hardware” (cognitive modules) originally built for person-evaluation tasks like threat detection and mate selection. In turn, stereotypes—our socially-conditioned “software”—make us likely to evaluate members of some groups as more threatening or more attractive than others. I find evidence of these biases even in real elections where voters see candidates’ other qualifications. When aggregated, these tendencies affect election outcomes and have attendant pernicious consequences for descriptive representation of women and ethnic minority candidates, as well as for democratic accountability in locales that hold direct elections of candidates.

Rachel Bernhard is an Associate Professor of Quantitative Political Science Research Methods at Nuffield College and the University of Oxford. Before joining Nuffield, she served as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a Postdoctoral Prize Fellow in Politics at Nuffield. She recently published a book on appearance-based discrimination in politics and has taught classes on political psychology and public policy, identity politics, statistics and research design, women in politics, and computational methods.