Examining the Evolving Understanding of Presidential Greatness

For many decades experts and regular citizens alike have discussed and debated which of our presidents were the greatest, and why. Since the 1960s, thanks to the pioneering efforts of Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., there have been a series of increasingly sophisticated efforts to measure this sentiment in the form of presidential greatness rankings. In recent years, political scientists have used quantitative statistical analysis to determine the relative importance of a growing number of explanatory factors, ranging from a variety of measures related to fighting and winning wars to more recent theoretical contributions such as economic performance and policy productivity. Now, with well over a dozen scholarly rankings of presidential greatness from the past 70 years, we are able to not only analyze which factors matter most when determining assessments of greatness, but also how the relative importance of these factors has changed over time. That is, we can determine whether the key explanatory factors in 1948 remained so in 1982, and 1996, and 2014, or if over time (and the development of the modern presidency) the importance of some factors waxed while that of others waned. In this paper I utilize a consistent empirical model as I evaluate the explanatory power of the leading factors systematically across several different rankings’ results stretching from 1948-2014. The results tell us a great deal about evolving expectations for presidential leadership.