Are you an undecided voter still up in the air about what to do on Tuesday if/when you head to the polls?
If so, here’s a non-substantive reason to vote for one party over the other: Based on 100 subtle physical dimensions, female GOP officeholders in the US House of Representatives are much better looking than their Democrat counterparts, according to a recent UCLA study about “appearance-based politics.”
As explained in a UCLA news release , lead author Colleen M. Carpinella summarized these findings about GOP women being hot:
“Female politicians with stereotypically feminine facial features are more likely to be Republican than Democrat, and the correlation increases the more conservative the lawmaker’s voting record.”
Co-author Dr. Kerry Johnson referred to it as the “Michele Bachman effect.” Bachmann, who ran for president in the 2012 GOP primary and represents Minnesota’s 6th Congressional district, is shown above.
In the study, 120 UCLA undergraduates looked at pictures of all 435 House members in the 111th Congress (2009-2010) and had to guess their party affiliation.
“When the undergraduates guessed that a politician was Republican, their judgments were 98 percent more likely to be accurate for women with the highest rankings for femininity; the accuracy of their judgments increased the more feminine the politician’s face.”
Another GOP officeholder is Congresswoman Kristi Noem, who currently represents South Dakota’s at-large Congressional District, but took office after this study was completed.
As The Daily Caller suggests, “While beauty is entirely subjective, the more traditionally attractive facial features were pegged, almost entirely accurately, as conservative.”
The study authors also allude to the claim that GOP politicians and policies bolster “traditional sex roles,” except that doesn’t seem to hold up since running for Congress is generally not what would be considered traditional — for either gender for that matter.
The full study on was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology .