Study finds that conservative politicians are ‘happier and more attractive’

Conservative female politicians look happier and more attractive in pictures than liberals, according to artificial intelligence.

A study conducted in Denmark and published in Scientific Reports found that those on the right were more likely to have happier facial expressions, whereas liberals looked more neutral.

The scientists inputted some 3,200 photos of political candidates who ran in the 2017 Danish municipal election into Microsoft Azure’s Face API tool to assess the person’s emotional state.

The analysis found 80 per cent of the faces displayed a happy expression, while 19 per cent read as neutral.

“For females (though not males), high attractiveness scores were found among those the model identified as likely to be conservative,” read the findings. “These results are credible given that previous research using human raters has also highlighted a link between attractiveness and conservatism.”

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Meanwhile, left-leaning male politicians showed more neutral, less happy faces than their conservative counterparts, the study found.

“Attractiveness was not the only correlate of model-predicted ideology,” the scientists explained. “We also found that expressing happiness is associated with conservatism for both genders.

“Previous work has found smiling in photographs to be a valid indicator of extraversion,” they continued. “And while extraversion is not broadly associated with ideology some studies have found that right-wing politicians are more extraverted.”

Scientists noted that “because attractiveness generally helps electoral success, all candidates are incentivised to provide an attractive photograph.”

“Politicians on the left and right may have different incentives for smiling — for example, smiling faces have been found to look more attractive which is comparatively important for conservative politicians,” the paper reads.

“Future work is needed to explore the extent to which happy faces are indicative of conservatism outside of samples of politicians."

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