[{"jcr:title":"Candidate appearance interferes in their voting, states a study on Brazil","cq:tags_0":"area-de-conhecimento:políticas-públicas"},{"richText":"The more masculine a woman’s face, the highest her chances of being elected","authorDate":"18/11/1022 10h36","madeBy":"Por","tag":"tipos-de-conteudo:insper-conhecimento","title":"Candidate appearance interferes in their voting, states a study on Brazil","variant":"imagecolor"},{"jcr:title":"transparente - turquesa - vermelho"},{"themeName":"transparente - turquesa - vermelho"},{"containerType":"containerTwo"},{"jcr:title":"Grid Container Section","layout":"responsiveGrid"},{"text":"When a candidate gets exposed at TV advertisement in Brazil, their appearance characteristics count on their number of votes. Such ratio is higher for women, which election chances get higher rise as their faces contain more masculine traces, revealing an implicit gender bias on the way the voters select candidates face features. The lower information on the candidate the voters have, the higher they tend to resort to candidates’ appearance to decide the vote.   On his Doctor’s degree thesis on Insper, Felipe Wajskop França got to those conclusions by analyzing over 1.5 million pictures of candidates to city councilor, mayor, state and federal congressperson, who ran on elections from 2004 to 2018. His objective was to investigate the recurring hypothesis that physical features help to predict electoral results, by using results of Brazilian.   Computing techniques allow to extract from a bidimensional image, such as from candidates to political positions stored at Election Justice, dozens of face features’ identifying points — nose, eyes, ears, mouth, etc. — of each person and to map them at a 3-dimension cartesian scheme.   Considering the relation among these points and social psychology literature, Felipe built four appearance measures: symmetry, typicality (being close from regional average measures), youth (looking young) and sexual dysmorphism. In literature, the first three ones are associated to attractivity and competence. The male features are associated to dominance; female features, to honesty.   Candidates to city councilor, the position with more competitors, male face features are more frequent on South and Southeast and more feminine in Northeast. There is a higher similarity of faces in South; in North, faces are more diverse. Politicians running by right-wing parties show more male face features than the ones from left-wing. Non-white candidates appear to be younger than white ones. The ones running on smaller and poorer cities tend to have more uniform face features.   Econometrical analysis allowed researcher to confront election results to the variables that express candidates’ appearances to verify if face features associated to attractivity, dominance (masculinity) or honesty (femininity) turn into more votes. Through this mechanism called heuristics voter would use shortcuts that replace more detailed and well-informed assessment to decide who to vote.   In order to focus investigation in situations in which voter is exposed to candidate image, Felipe França’s work identified locations where there are TV stations and, therefore, have the legal obligation to show election propaganda of local candidates.   Main result from this exercise shows that, for female candidates to city positions (councilors and mayors), faces containing more masculine features get to obtain more votes on the ballots. Male candidates do not seem to benefit from their appearance, or being harmed from it, at a persistent manner.   In this point, the work demonstrates a sexist gender bias in the manner voters’ heuristic mechanisms act to search in female candidates face features that place them close to male ones.   The capacity to raise funding for the city and the administration performance on anti-corruption integrity test were used by researcher to assess if city halls ran by good appearance politicians overcome on management quality. Answer was negative, suggesting that heuristics in this case does not turn to be an effective method to choose public managers.   Taking Advantage of the gradual inclusion of voting machine that increased the amount of votes from the less instructed part of voters, Felipe França tested and validated the hypothesis that those voters, who turn to be the poorer ones, use more frequently the judgement on candidates’ appearance to decide the vote."}]