Threat, Power, and Presidential Greatness: Harding to Johnson

Abstract

To ascertain whether an earlier finding by McCann and Stewin that electoral success of U.S. presidents is positively correlated with the congruence between the president's power motivation and prevailing societal threat is transferrable to historians' estimates of presidential greatness, power scores were obtained from Winter, greatness scores were taken from Maranell, and prevailing threat through each president's administration was derived from the social, economic, and political threat index developed by McCann and Stewin, for each president from Harding to Johnson. Greatness correlated positively with threat and power. Correlations between greatness and congruence scores, based on combinations of standardized power and threat scores, were negative and substantial but nonsignificant. It appears on the basis of this small sample that the McCann and Stewin hypothesis is not transferrable to greatness. The nature of the relationships for this sample is opposite to that found for voters' preferences and is analogous to the finding of Winter concerning congruence of presidents' and society's motives.