We study the role of beauty in politics using candidate photos that figured prominently in electoral campaigns. Our investigation is based on visual assessments of 1929 Finnish political candidates from 10,011 respondents (of which 3708 were Finnish). As Finland has a proportional electoral...

Recent research has documented that competent-looking political candidates do better in US elections and that babyfaced individuals are generally perceived to be less competent than maturefaced individuals. Taken together, this suggests that babyfaced political candidates are perceived as less...

We investigate empirically how party ideology influences size and scope of government as measured by the size of government, tax structure and labor market regulation. Our dataset comprises 49 US states over the 1993-2009 period. We employ the new data on the ideological mapping of US...

This paper examines how political ideology influenced economic freedom across the Canadian provinces. We analyze the data set of economic freedom indicators compiled by the Fraser Institute in 10 Canadian provinces over the 1981-2005 period and introduce two different indices of political...

This article examines how government ideology influenced privatization efforts in Central and Eastern Europe after the transition from socialism. We analyse a dataset of privatization indicators covering small- and large-scale industries in 19 transition countries over the period 1990-2007 and...