The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: do attractive Politicians get a ‘break’ when they are involved in Scandals?

In general, politicians involved in scandals of different nature are punished by voters. Good-looking politicians, on the contrary, are rewarded by voters. Almost fifty years of empirical research has shown that ill-informed voters will use the physical attractiveness of candidates as a heuristic device to determine their voting behaviour. This article represents the first attempt to link the existing literature on the electoral effects of scandals with the existing literature on the electoral impact of candidate attractiveness. Using data on U.S. House of Representatives elections between 1972 and 2012, we find that candidate attractiveness mitigates the negative electoral effects of involvement in scandal.