The Evaluation of Presidents: An Extension of the Schlesinger Polls

Abstract

IN 1948 and again in 1962, Arthur M. Schlesinger asked panels of historians and political scientists to rate the Presidents of the United States in categories ranging from great to failure. Although these polls have been subjected to criticism, they have proved useful.' But there are serious problems inherent in this type of research. This essay enlarges upon the Schlesinger polls, as well as updates them. It also introduces crucial methodological changes such as the use of socialpsychological scaling methods instead of a simple ranking, the inclusion of additional dimensions of evaluation, the use of a much larger and less biased sample, and the use of a single professional society as a sampling frame. The two Schlesinger studies, which created the interest in this line of inquiry, found the following ordering of Presidents (see Table 1). A question that might well have concerned many readers of the earlier presidential polls involves the possible alternative meanings and dimensions that may have been employed in the ratings of prestige. It is easy to see that an active President may be seen as prestigious, regardless of the significance of his accomplishments, or that an idealistic President may be more highly regarded than a practical one. To take into account questions like these, it was necessary to include ratings of other dimensions in addition to that of prestige. A total of seven dimensions were used in this study. The use of these additional dimensions allows for an examination of the relationships among them, which, in turn, permits increased understanding of what is involved in (or related to) the rating of presidential prestige. The present survey employed a standard social-psychological scaling