Facial Competence and Vote Choice

The link below is to a figure with the distributions of "facial competence" among candidates for the the United States House of Representative in 2004 and Senate from 1992-2006, as measured by Matthew Atkinson, Seth Hill, and Ryan Enos using the method described in "Candidate Faces and Election Outcomes: Is the Face-Vote Correlation Caused by Candidate Selection?" (Quarterly Journal of Political Science 4 (3), pp 229-249). Note that the shaded regions of the distributions represent challengers.

Competence Distribution

For an example of the instrument we used to generate these scores. You can visit Seth's page. This is a mockup of the survey, with which we presented participants with randomly drawn pairings of candidates.

Survey Example