Divided government and the bias against presidential restraint

Abstract

ABSTRACT Comparative rankings of presidential performance can be clouded with partisan biases. Here, we argue that the presidential rankings literature contains an overlooked bias favoring presidential activity. It is easier to observe the use of power than the exercise of restraint. As such, expert rankings of presidents may exhibit a selection bias whereby we are best able to evaluate those who are more proactive rather than those who, willfully or not, exercise political restraint. In this paper, we consider how presidential rankings of greatness are affected by measures of presidential restraint. In other words, we are not interested in the quality of presidencies, but in the quality of the rankings. We create five measures of restraint: divided government, use of the veto power, military interventions, army size, and changes in the size of government. We argue that the first two provide measures of involuntary restraint while the remaining three represent measures of willful restraint. Using OLS (for presidential scores) and ordered probit (for presidential rankings) for presidents up to George W. Bush, only one measure of restraint has a consistently negative and significant effect: divided government. This suggests the presence of bias in historical evaluation whereby presidents who had more room to act rank higher in presidential rankings.