The Face Says It All: Facial Cues and Candidate Evaluation in Portugal

• In Event: Democracy's Status in Iberia: From Retrenchment to Reimagination?

Abstract

Voters’ evaluation of political candidates plays an important role in electoral behaviour, not least given the trend towards the ‘personalization of politics’ (McAllister, 1996). Recent literature points to two interrelated perspectives regarding voters’ evaluations of candidates. First, the role of candidates’ personality traits, at least as perceived by voters (Garzia, 2017). Second, the findings of experimental research show that voters’ evaluation of candidates’ personality traits appears to derive, to a significant extent, from facial cues: i.e., the spontaneous trait inferences they perceive from the candidates’ faces (e.g., Todorov et al, 2005; Marcinkowski, Lünich & Starke, 2017)

At the same time, these elements cannot be dissociated from more conventional perspectives on voting behaviour, such as candidates’ ideological positions. Moreover, the research on facial cues opens the possibility that voters generate inferences not only regarding candidates’ personality but also potentially regarding their ideological leaning (Samochowiec, Wänke & Fiedler, 2013) which in turn can interact with personality trait evaluations.

In this paper, we expand on the burgeoning literature on the evaluations of candidates based on facial cues, providing a more complete picture of the cues that candidates’ faces provide and disentangling the ideological and personality traits inferences that they generate for voters. More specifically, the paper integrates three interrelated elements:

1. How facial cues influence the evaluation of candidate personality traits among Portuguese voters;
2. To what extent facial cues shape the perceived ideological positions of political candidates in Portugal;
3. How the personality traits and ideological positions inferred from candidate faces explain actual electoral outcomes.

The paper draws on a survey experiment with 1510 participants from a representative sample of the Portuguese population, measuring eight personality traits and 72 distinct candidate faces. It contributes to the existing literature in three ways. First, it examines the link between not only facial inferences and personality traits but also other dimensions that potentially play a role, notably candidates’ perceived ideological positioning. Second, by examining the Portuguese case, it extends research on facial cues to a cultural and political context – notably, that of the inaugural third wave democracy – that the existing literature has not yet examined. Indeed, this is the first such study for Portugal and potentially one of the first, if not the first, for the Iberian countries as a whole. Finally, it is one of the rare studies to draw on a representative sample of the population, allowing not only for greater external validity but also to assess how voters’ sociodemographic characteristics shape the inferences drawn from candidate’s faces.

Authors

• Carlos Jalali, University of Aveiro, Research Unit on Governance, Competitiveness and Public Policies

• Patricia Silva, University of Aveiro

• Patricio Soares Costa, University of Minho, ICVS