Beauty and electoral success
Date
2009-10
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Abstract
This paper studies how beauty affects the electoral success of a candidate in the University Student Council (USC) elections in the University of the Philippines, Diliman. Beauty confers many advantages to a person as observed in the labor market and in the political arena. We test the hypothesis that a better-looking candidate has higher chances of being elected into office in the local University Elections. We use the following variables: ratings of beauty, competence, trustworthiness, gender, number of organizations, and incumbency to estimate two models: Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Logistic regressions. This paper is the first of its kind to establish such relationship between beauty and electoral success in the university and in the country. Using cross pooled data of the candidates from 2007 to 2009, our results show negative effects of beauty using OLS and positive marginal effects of all the variables using Logit regression. There is no definite effect of beauty on electoral success in the sample we examined.
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Keywords
USC election, University student council, Local election, Election, Student election, Politics