In the United States, these results might mean that GOP candidates have an advantage over Democrats in elections simply because they tend to be better looking. “Politicians on the right are more beautiful than politicians on the left in Europe, the United States, and Australia,” the authors of the study write, adding that “their beauty advantage, all else equal, makes candidates on the right more likely to win office and implement their preferred policies.”

The study, titled The right look: Conservative politicians look better and voters reward it, goes on to argue that conservative politicians are not only considered more attractive on average, but also derive more benefit from that perception than liberal politicians who are similarly attractive. Specifically, the study found that attractive conservative politicians won more votes than attractive liberal politicians in elections when voters didn’t know much about the candidates.

It proposes that one potential explanation for why attractive conservative candidates win more votes is because conservative and liberal voters alike assume that more attractive candidates lean conservative. As a result, attractive conservative candidates might receive an added boost by winning votes from conservative voters who believe the candidate is more likely to stand up for conservative values, while some liberal voters might be less inclined to vote for attractive liberal candidates since they may assume the candidates are conservative or at least lean that way in terms of ideological preference.

Further supporting the idea that voters associate good looks with conservatism, researchers asked respondents to guess which political party politicians represented based on a photograph. They found that conservative politicians who were correctly guessed to be conservative were on average more attractive than conservative politicians that respondents did not correctly identify as conservative.

“The more good-looking a candidate, the more he or she is thought to stand to the right,” one of the study authors Professor Panu Poutvaara of the University of Munich and Ifo Institute, said in an-email, adding: “This connection holds among both liberal and conservative voters.”

The research suggests voters on both the left and the right use beauty as a kind of mental shortcut when deciding how to vote in scenarios where they don’t know much about the candidates. “Voters indeed use beauty as a cue for candidate ideology,” the authors write in the study.

So why would conservative politicians be more attractive on average in the United States, Europe and Australia? The study offers a possible explanation, arguing that as a result of the monetary advantages and general privilege conferred by good looks, attractive people may be more likely to end up identifying as conservatives. According to the researchers:

A simple economic explanation of the appearance gap in favor of the right is that beautiful people earn more money, and the more people earn, the more they are inclined to oppose redistribution and, arguably, to support, get active in, and represent parties to the right. A more general psychological explanation could be that good-looking people are more likely to perceive the world as a just place, since they are treated better than others, and are happier, and a frequent reason for people to sympathize with the left is a perception of the world as unfair.

The research is not an exhaustive study of conservative parties, candidates and voting behavior. In studying politicians in the United States, for example, researchers only looked at candidates running in elections dating from 1995 to 2008, and excluded Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton from their analysis. Given their high-profile, respondents might recognize both politicians and not be able to provide an unbiased assessment.