The beauty premium in politics may result from a lack of knowledge about candidates

Back in 2017, I wrote a post about two research papers that looked at the beauty premium in political contests. The first of those two papers of those two papers (ungated earlier version here) showed that:

...politicians on the right are indeed more attractive than politicians on the left, using data from Australia, the European Union, Finland, and the United States...

They argue with a nice theoretical model that the reason for these differences is based on two things: (1) attractiveness is itself valuable, and voters are more likely to vote for attractive candidates; and (2) attractiveness signals that politicians have views that are further to the right. So, this explains why the attractiveness premium is greater for politicians on the right in low-information settings (where both effects work in the same direction) compared to politicians on the left (where the effects work in opposite directions, since left-preferring voters are more likely to see an attractive left candidate as being to the right of their views).

Another 2017 article, by Todd Jones (Cornell University) and Joseph Price (Brigham Young University), published in the journal Contemporary Economic Policy (sorry, I don't see an ungated version online), covers similar ground. Jones and Price compare the beauty premium between elections for the U.S. congress (where candidates are relatively well known) and elections for the House and Senate of individual states (where candidates are generally less well known). They use data for 800 candidates from 400 elections in 2012 (200 U.S. House and Senate elections, and 200 state-level House and Senate elections). The basic results are in line with the rest of the literature, as:

...a one standard deviation increase in a candidate’s beauty is associated with a 1.1 percentage point increase in the fraction of votes received and a 6.0 percentage point increase in the probability of winning the election.

Nothing new there - that's the beauty premium at work. When comparing high-profile and low-profile elections, they find that:

 ...the interaction term between beauty and high-profile election is −1.4 percentage points for vote share and −6.3 percentage points for winning (not significant), indicating that the beauty premium is much smaller for high-profile elections. The interaction term between beauty and incumbency status is also negative, with a coefficient of −2.2 percentage points for vote share and −9.0 percentage points in terms of winning the election, although this latter number is not significant.

Both of those results suggest that, when candidates are better known (as they would be for higher profile elections, and if they are the incumbent), the beauty premium is lower. They also find that:

...for each standard deviation a candidate is above the beauty mean the candidate loses a beauty premium of 1.6 percentage points in vote share for every standard deviation they spend above the sample mean. Generally, the positive 3.3% direct effect of spending outweighs the added beauty premium but it does leave the possibility that spending more could outweigh the beauty premium for candidates more than two standard deviations below the sample mean. 

On other words, candidates that spend more on their election have a lower beauty premium, and if they are ugly enough, the negative beauty premium would more than offset the gains from their election spending. Taken all together, and bearing in mind that these are correlations rather than causal, these results suggest that when voters are less aware of the candidates in the election (as would be the case for low profile elections, non-incumbent candidates, or where the candidate has not spent much on electioneering), the voters use each candidates' attractiveness as a signal of whether they should vote for them. This leads Jones and Price to conclude that:

...increased campaign spending may be socially beneficial by reducing biases that affect how individuals vote.

Many people argue that election campaigns involve too much spending. However, it appears that there is an argument to be made to the contrary, especially for otherwise low profile elections.