Rodrigo Praino

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Flinders University

Objective In this article we show that physical attractiveness matters as a heuristic device for uninformed voters but not for politically savvy voters.Methods Drawing on a two-step experiment, we first ask over 100 students to rank the physical attractiveness of candidates to the U.S. House of Representatives. Second, we create a treatment and a c...

A whole array of studies has shown that the physical appearance of candidates running for elective office matters. However, it is unclear whether attractiveness or perceived competence is the source of such electoral advantage. In addition, the gender of candidates might interact with perceptions of physical appearance. With the help of Canadian st...

Objective We have two goals. First, we investigate both the short‐ and long‐term electoral impact of involvement in scandals on reelection margins of incumbents in U.S. congressional elections. Second, we evaluate the impact of scandals on district‐level turnout. Methods We model the impact of involvement in a political scandal on incumbents’ elect...

Many studies provide valuable insight on the electoral incumbency advantage; however, little work provides insight or an organized theory for how such an advantage develops for career politicians. We develop such a theory, arguing that to understand the incumbency advantage at the time of an electoral victory, it is necessary to consider the length...

While every student in American politics knows that the incumbency advantage grew post‐1965, it is less clear as to whether or not this growth has been sustainable throughout the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Focusing on the last three decades, we show that the electoral margins of sitting members of the House of Representatives have not linearly grown o...

This chapter offers a methodology to operationalise the conceptual framework described in Chap. 2. It provides a detailed description of how spacepower can be disaggregated into its two constituent dimensions of capacity and autonomy, and how these can be further broken down into four subdimensions: hard capacity, soft capacity, hard (or technical)...

This chapter presents an analysis of the original empirical data collected in light of our theoretical framework. It presents a comparison of major space actors within the two prominent dimensions of capacity and autonomy along with a detailed analysis of the related subdimensions. The actors selected have been among the most active in space in the...

This chapter sets forth a comprehensive, cross-disciplinary conceptual framework aimed at a dynamic comparison of space actors, taking into account their technical, industrial and political characteristics as well as the trajectories that bring them in or take them out of ‘the club’ of space powers. It contends that space power is a form of state p...

After a decades-long hiatus, the Moon has re-emerged as the main target of the major space powers’ human exploration activities. Unlike the cooperative approaches that characterized human spaceflight activities in the aftermath of the cold war, upcoming lunar exploration endeavours seem to feature a more competitive approach and lean towards a prog...

Recent elections around the world have seen young voters come out in large numbers to support young leaders running for office, such as New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern in October 2020. At the same time, however, young voters have shown strong support for relatively older candidates such as Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom and Bernie Sanders in the...

As space assets continue to move towards the integration of more advanced information technologies the entry points for cyber-attacks are inevitably bound to increase. Similarly, the globalization of the space supply chain, the proliferation of small satellites using COTS components and the possibility to operate space mission payloads across netwo...

Concept review on right-wing extremism (RWE) holds that authoritarianism, nationalism and anti-democracy are the values that most strongly correlate. Evidence suggests these views are prevalent among military veterans. In this paper we test the hypothesis that individuals that are subjected to martialization are more likely to hold RWE values than...

As the number of scandals involving politicians in office rises worldwide, the number of studies dedicated to analysing these scandals and their consequences rises as well. In this article, we try to summarise this emerging literature focusing on quantitative studies that use scandal as an independent variable to model its influence on politicians’...

In general, politicians involved in scandals of various natures are punished by voters. Good-looking politicians, on the contrary, are rewarded by voters. Almost fifty years of empirical research has shown that ill-informed voters will use the physical attractiveness of candidates, as well as readily-available information on scandal allegations inv...

Objective In this article, we address two major gaps in the understanding of the relationship between candidate attractiveness and electoral success. With the assistance of the Victoria Police Criminal Identification Unit in Melbourne, Australia, we show how good‐looking candidates look like by building the faces of six “ideal candidates” in terms...

Ninety three of the 1,818 people who served in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1972 and 2012 were investigated for corruption by the Ethics Committee. Eighteen were acquitted and 75 suffered consequences (reprimand/payback/resignation/conviction). Detailed analysis of the data shows that the longer one is in Congress, the more likely is t...

While existing studies have shown that more attractive candidates running for office have an electoral advantage, very little has been written on how this advantage relates to different institutions. We theorise that formal institutions mediate the positive effect from which attractive candidates benefit. More in detail, we focus on the type of ele...

Various studies have outlined the institutional (e.g. the existence of quota laws and the electoral system type of a country) and non-institutional factors (e.g. the political culture of a country) that account for variation in women’s representation, in general, and, in more detail, the low representation of women in the US Congress. However, no s...

This article seeks to stimulate interest in the study of ethnicity and ancestry as important determinants of political behavior in the United States. Its hypothesis is that membership in a specific ethnic group—Americans of Italian ancestry—is an important determinant of political behavior in that it influences and shapes the legislative voting beh...

Even though, sociologically, the average Italian/American Member of Congress (MC) is virtually identical to his/her non-Italian/American counterpart, there are important and remarkable differences between the two that are attributable to their ethnic background. This work shows that Italian/Americans should not be dismissed as a political force jus...

With the passing of recent landmark legislation, Italy is now among the few countries in the world that allow citizens living abroad to elect their own representatives to the national Parliament. This unique situation provides an opportunity to investigate several interesting questions about political participation and representation. This work arg...

This article evaluates the incumbency advantage in the U.S. Senate. We argue that existing methods utilized to measure this advantage are suboptimal to gauge the concept in the Senate. After testing and highlighting the weaknesses of some of these methods, we present an alternative way to measure the incumbency advantage based on the number of elec...