Berkley Center

After a week-long travel break, I arrived back in Copenhagen late on a Sunday night and was greeted by an interesting face—or rather, dozens of interesting faces. As I stepped off the train and pulled my suitcase up the road that I had traveled at least twice a day since arriving in Denmark over two months ago, and towards my host family’s house, I noticed many faces grinning down at me from the lampposts that lit my path home. I realized quickly that they were campaign posters, and Denmark’s municipal and regional elections, which I had heard about prior to my trip, were now less than one month away.

The campaigning for the upcoming election did not confuse me; however I was slightly startled to notice glossy posters with people’s faces, names, and party affiliation on them covering every lamppost throughout Copenhagen and its suburbs as I walked to class the next morning. To be honest, the Danish campaign posters were off-putting. No matter where I turned in the city, the smiling faces of the candidates stared down at me from all directions.

At first, I did not understand my own confusion; every politician must campaign, and many of my friends at Georgetown have been involved in canvassing for presidential, state, and citywide campaigns. By the end of the day though, I figured out what had been bothering me about the posters—it was the faces. I realized that in the United States, the campaign posters I see on lawns around the city when elections are coming up never have the faces of the candidates on them—only their names, usually in extremely large lettering.

After a cursory Google search yielded no results about the reasoning behind the Danish campaign posters, I started to ask some of the Danes I knew—my host family, teachers, and a random assortment of friends—why their posters had the faces of the candidates displayed on them. Many responded that it made people more likely to vote for the candidates because it made it easier for the average citizen to connect with them. By seeing their faces, they explained, they felt more like they knew them and they were more likely to trust them. That response satisfied me, but later in the week I came across an opinion piece in the New York Times which presented evidence showing that people are more likely to vote for attractive candidates, not because we link attractiveness with other positive characteristics such as intelligence or friendliness, but because the qualities that are associated with attractiveness are also connected to positive health status. The article continues that we are interested in leaders who are disease-free not only because it is good for our country, but also because we want to avoid being infected ourselves..

I began to wonder why politicians in the United States do not adopt similar tactics. While President Obama’s HOPE poster had been popular during the 2008 presidential election, it seems to be the exception instead of the rule nowadays. Furthermore, during that election, while there were many questions swirling around about John McCain’s health, would it not have been a smart move for the Obama campaign to plaster posters of their youthful, attractive candidate’s face in bus stops and on lampposts in cities across the United States, instead of leaving the HOPE Poster to be shared mostly on social media platforms? Looking back, it seems like presidential campaign posters even dating back just as recently as President Ronald Reagan’s elections utilized images frequently. However, even as printing images became cheaper and easier, candidates in the United States turned to the simplest designs in order to get their message across to the voters and began adopting the standard poster with their last names and a patriotic color scheme. While Danish campaign posters are more unnerving to me than those I see in the United States, I am beginning to understand their logic. In 2011, Denmark had an 87 percent voter turnout rate for their parliamentary elections, and that is mostly due to the fact that Danes feel uniquely connected to their politicians in a way that many American citizens do not. If these posters are a contributing factor to Denmark’s extremely high percentage of voter participation in its elections, then I cannot be anything but supportive of them, even if it does mean seeing a few extra faces around town.