The Unsettled Effect of Physical Height on Political Preferences

• In Event: The Role of Ideology in Public Opinion

Abstract

Several studies have shown that people who are physically taller also have more conservative political preferences. The curious effect of height on both partisan voting choices and political preferences has been demonstrated by political scientists and psychologists in multiple countries (e.g., Richardson 2021). Separately, economists have shown that taller people also enjoy enhanced financial well-being in the form of higher incomes, better health, and greater educational attainment (e.g. Case and Paxson 2008; Persico, Postlewaite, and Silverman 2004). Connecting these two sets of results, Arunachalam and Watson (2018) contend that the effect of height on political preferences works through – and only through – economic well-being. They argue that taller people are more conservative only because of their higher socioeconomic status. Because height has no direct effect on preferences, Arunachalam and Watson contend that it can be effectively use as an instrument for income in datasets where reliable and valid measures of income are unavailable.

We challenge this conclusion in two ways.

First, we clarify theoretically what relationships must exist and not exist between height, well-being, preferences, and other individual-level variables for height to serve as appropriate instrument. Based on secondary research, we contend that the necessary conditions – namely no effect of height on preferences except through financial well-being and a strong relationship at that – are unlikely to be met.

Second, we undertake extensive empirical analysis using two complementary survey datasets from the U.S. to demonstrate that height has only a small effect on political preferences and that effect does not mainly work through economic well-being, two factors that disqualify it as an instrument.

In a diverse and large national online survey conducted by Harris Interactive in which respondents reported heights, weights, partisanship, policy views, and many other variables, we show that height has a modest but consistent effect on political preferences, but that effect does not diminish when the presumed intervening mediators – income, education, and health – are included in the analysis. In addition, we show that the height-preferences relationship is not an artifact of racial and ethnic differences in these characteristics.

Using the Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey, which tracked respondents over a 50-year period, we probe the causal relationship between height and preferences even more thoroughly. Analyses of the WLS data all direct examination of variables that cast additional doubt on the Arunachalam and Watson argument. First, the survey includes both self-reported height and height measured objectively in person, thus removing the possibility that systematic misreporting was causal artifactual relationships. Second, the survey includes an extensive better of health, cognitive functioning, and material well-being measures that go beyond simple measures of income and educational attainment. Third, the survey includes measures of several psychological orientations that could presumably serve as the mechanisms the height effect: the “Big Five” personality traits, self-confidence and environmental mastery, and masculinity. Fourth, the survey includes measures of a parental resources that might plausibly induce a relationship between the respondent’s height and preferences. Fifth, leveraging the longitudinal aspect of the survey we can account for factors established early in life such as intelligence and physical attractiveness that may be related to height. Finally, the survey includes comparable data on siblings of the original respondents, thus allowing use of fixed effects to control away factors related to upbringing and genetic inheritance.

The results of our analysis show that the effect of height on political preferences is extremely small but also rather robust. Including post-treatment variables hypothesized to serve as mechanisms linking health and political preferences does little to undermine this fundamental relationship. As with earlier studies, we find a slightly larger effect of height among men than among women, although the small gender differential again suggests that the effect is not due mainly to the mechanism of greater material well-being.

Authors

• Barry C. Burden, University of Wisconsin

• Pamela Herd, University of Wisconsin, Madison

• Donald P. Moynihan, Georgetown University