Social scientists at Texas Tech university have recently published their findings about voter preferences for taller leaders. To test this hypothesis, last week the Guardian put together a list of 51 international statesmen and women, and their respective measurements. These findings invite all kinds of speculation, so before drawing any conclusions, let’s look at the distribution of the sample, weed out a few anomalies and apply some subjective filtering.
The Guardian’s data sample ranges across eras and cultures, from the diminutive Mexican president Benito Juárez (1806–1872) to Gallic man-mountain General Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970), with many historical and contemporary figures in between. The sample size is relatively small, and one feels they’ve deliberately chosen some outliers, but the selection is spread over a wide range of countries and eras.
Twin Peaks
In a normal population, heights would be distributed into a bell curve. By contrast, this group is clustered into two peaks, and there is a big gap around about where you’d expect the apex. A slight majority of leaders fall below the mean height of 5’9″, with a long tail at the lower end. Taller leaders peak in the top quartile, at 6’1″.
Gender correction
While it’s possible that these rules also apply to women in office, there’s no getting away from the fact that the female of the species are on average smaller in stature, so including them in the sample is going to skew it downwards. Hence, we can remove five ladies of decidedly average height, and one a little above it. So while men of average height are not at all represented in the sample, neither are there any women significantly outside the norm.
Leadership Style
Let’s remove some of those troublesome dictatorial types, who achieve power by coercion or other non-democratic means. A total of ten men, only three of them above average height. This is a qualitative discrimination, by which the definition of democracy gets a stretching and we remove candidates who may be guilty of perverting the democratic process. For instance, Iranian premiere Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005, and was re-elected in 2009, but the latter of these two victories has been called into question. Likewise, Vladimir Putin has been elected by the people in the past, enjoys considerable popular support, but has lately displayed a certain disregard for the ballot box, and currently holds a position of his own devising. And we all know who else was elected to power in 1932.
Public Preference
But wait. By the same reasoning, we can arguably filter out some other people who didn’t actually win elections. George Bush fiddled it at least once; David Cameron and Nick Clegg both failed to win outright; and Gordon Brown and James Callaghan both came to power without having been elected by the public at all. All men of above-average height, who don’t exactly qualify as dictators, but weren’t necessarily preferred by a voting majority either.
At this point, we may have homed in on voter preferences, but we’ve lost more than a third of the sample, and the data no longer looks like very much of anything. The overview suggests that while the public may indeed prefer to put an alpha male in office, those of smaller stature are just as likely to put themselves there. But the two smallest men in the sample were respected statesmen with impeccable democratic records. Conspicuous by their absence are leaders in the middle height range, but norms haven’t been corrected for geography, time period, economic conditions or living standards.
Tempting as it is to buy into our expectations about the nature of power and the physical stature of the ruling elite, apply a few specious arguments to a tiny sample selected with an editorial eye, and the information can mean anything at all. With this in mind, we submit the following absurd but strangely plausible hypotheses:
- Men of average height are underrepresented in high political office.
- So too are women of any height.
- A dictatorial style of leadership is often found among shorter men.
- Taller men have been known to game the system.
- Great statesmen can be very short indeed.
But perhaps the most striking conclusion is this: if voters do in fact prefer taller leaders, this is not evidenced by any process of selection as demonstrated here. Depending on what you believe, this might be another way of saying that if democracy exists as a system for expressing the wishes of the electorate, then it doesn’t actually work.
