title: Health at the ballot box: disease threat does not predict attractiveness preference in British politicians.
abstract: According to disease avoidance theory, selective pressures have shaped adaptive behaviours to avoid people who might transmit infections. Such behavioural immune defence strategies may have social and societal consequences. Attractiveness is perceived as a heuristic cue of good health, and the relative importance of attractiveness is predicted to increase during high disease threat. Here, we investigated whether politicians' attractiveness is more important for electoral success when disease threat is high, in an effort to replicate earlier findings from the USA. We performed a cross-sectional study of 484 members of the House of Commons from England and Wales. Publicly available sexiness ratings (median 5883 ratings/politician) were regressed on measures of disease burden, operationalized as infant mortality, life expectancy and self-rated health. Infant mortality in parliamentary constituencies did not significantly predict sexiness of elected members of parliament (p = 0.08), nor did life expectancy (p = 0.06), nor self-rated health (p = 0.55). Subsample analyses failed to provide further support for the hypothesis. In conclusion, an attractive leader effect was not amplified by disease threat in the UK and these results did not replicate those of earlier studies from the USA concerning the relationship between attractiveness, disease threat and voting preference.
authors.affiliation: Stress Research Institute, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden; Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
authors.forename: Gustav
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-5273-0150
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Nilsonne
authors.affiliation: Stress Research Institute , Stockholm University , Stockholm , Sweden.
authors.forename: Adam
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Renberg
authors.affiliation: Stress Research Institute, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden; Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
authors.forename: Sandra
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-5371-9631
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Tamm
authors.affiliation: Stress Research Institute, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden; Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
authors.forename: Mats
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-3998-1494
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lekander
keywords: attractiveness; behavioural immune system; disease avoidance; disease threat; self-rated health; voting behaviour