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SUMMARYAre beautiful politicians more likely to be elected? To test this, we use evidence from Australia, a country in which voting is compulsory, and in which voters are given 'How‐to‐Vote' cards, depicting photos of the major party candidates, as they arrive to vote. Using raters chosen to be representative of the electorate, we assess the beauty of political candidates from major political parties, and then estimate the effect of beauty on voteshare for candidates in the 2004 federal election. Beautiful candidates are indeed more likely to be elected, with a one standard deviation increase in beauty associated with a 1 ½– 2 percentage point increase in voteshare. Our results are robust to several specification checks: adding party fixed effects, dropping well‐known politicians, using non‐Australian beauty raters, omitting candidates of non‐Anglo appearance, controlling for age, and analyzing the 'beauty gap' between candidates running in the same electorate. The marginal effect of beauty is larger for male candidates than for female candidates, and appears to be approximately linear. Consistent with the theory that returns to beauty reflect discrimination, we find suggestive evidence that beauty matters more in electorates with a higher share of apathetic voters.

In Politicians Don't Pander, Lawrence Jacobs & Robert Shapiro show that politicians follow public opinion much less slavishly than conventional wisdom suggests. However, the case studies they themselves rely on show that public opinion constrains policymakers more than they claim. Conversely, to the extent that political leaders are able to ignore the public's wishes, Jacobs & Shapiro do not adequately consider the possibility that this is due in large part to severe voter ignorance of public policy. In urging greater obedience to the popular will, the authors also overlook the danger that increased adherence to the often internally contradictory wishes of the electorate may be impossible or undesirable. 30 References. Adapted from the source document.

The political potency of national history has been understood for generations. Yet there has been an unquestionable surge in history's political influence over the last twenty or thirty years, as the various history wars that have broken out around the world attest. Australia has been no exception: disputes over its national story continue to generate considerable controversy in the media, in politics and in public debate. But how has this politicisation of the past affected Australian political history in the present? This paper examines how history is practised in contemporary Australian politics — and notices an increasingly strategic use of the past by politicians in recent years.

Vladimir Putin's behaviour in office as president bore all the marks of a 'professional politician', as defined by Weber. The Soviet system was originally run by self-styled 'professional revolutionaries', but in subsequent generations, individuals from the broad population were promoted, and created a less focused system, in which they survived well but which they failed to modernize, and which continued largely through efforts invested 'out of plan', that is, outside the command system. When that system collapsed, they took over the running of society in a haphazard way under Boris Yeltsin, leaving a chaotic legacy to his successor, Putin. His approach was that of a politician intent upon confronting the collapse of the old system and the failure of a new system to become consolidated. His goal has been not a return to the Soviet system, but the establishment of a Russian nation-state. This entailed breaking the links between big business and politics established in the 1990s, abandoning the crude 'social contract' between undemanding managers and undisciplined workers that depended on corruption and illegality to keep Soviet society functioning, and building a solid and secure Russian nation-state. In this, despite concerns outside the country, he has been largely successful and has won broad, if not universal, support. In these circumstances, political pluralism has been postponed. Adapted from the source document.