A new study, recently released on the National Bureau of Economics Research website, has found that handsome men are more apt to win during an election.

It was found that good-looking male candidates had a 56 percent chance of winning an election while their less dashing opponents had a 44 percent chance. This was according to Daniel Hamermesh, the study's author and also an economics professor ast the University of Texas.

From 1996 through 2004 Hamermesh studied the election of officers for a professional group called the American Economic Association."It was very clear that being good-looking helped and also helped more for men than for women, and that seems to be something one finds in looking at the effect of beauty in other outcomes such as earnings and wages."

Even though this is what he found, he didn't have a clear answer as to why it was so. This was Hamermesh's sixth study on the impact of good looks. He has previously examined their effects in the classroom, the business arena, and the legal profession. During the study, he asked four outside subject, three men and one woman, to rate the attractiveness of 312 pictures used by 216 candidates on the ballots.

The same people running several times sent in different pictures each time. It was found that the better the picture, the more likely they had to do well.