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Are 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 �- 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. Copyright 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Past studies of ballot order effects have typically focused on the average benefit to a candidate from being placed at the top of the ballot. But it is possible that this simple average may mask systematic differences in how the ballot order effect varies across candidates and voters. To test this, we analyse all Australian federal elections from 1984-2004, a dataset that is an order of magnitude larger than those used in previous ballot order studies. We find that being placed first on the ballot increases a candidate's vote share by about 1 percentage point. As a proportion of their total vote, the ballot order effect is much larger for independents and minor parties than for major parties. The ballot order effect appears to be similar for male and female candidates, and does not show strong trends upwards or downwards over the 20 year period covered by our study. Across electorates, the ballot order effect is higher in places where voters are younger and fluency in English is lower. JEL Codes: D72

This article argues that the nexus between economic and security issues is a crucial cause of the deterioration in the U.S.-China relationship, which commenced around the mid-2010s. It outlines two strands of that nexus as enacted in the policies of the Obama and Trump administrations: (1) China's advances in acquiring and developing new technologies that have significant commercial and military value; and (2) the economic and legal instruments and policies the United States has adopted in the wake of China's commercial challenge to prosecute its wider strategic competition. The article traces the emergence and solidification of the economic-security nexus in U.S. policy towards China, before comparing the Obama and Trump administrations' responses to the technological challenge posed by China. We argue that while the Obama administration was slow to recognize the extent of the challenge, it had begun to pursue a strategy that might have resulted in the reduction of competitive zero-sum dynamics in this policy area. By contrast, the Trump administration has focused more directly on the significance of recent technological innovation by China, but has not found it possible to develop a coordinated approach to dealing with it.

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