Historical rankings of presidents of the United States
In political studies, surveys have been conducted in order to construct historical rankings of the success of the presidents of the United States.
[7] The Siena College Research Institute has conducted surveys in 1982, 1990, 1994, 2002, 2010, 2018 and 2022 – during the second year of the first term of each president since Ronald Reagan.
Poll respondents rated the presidents in five categories (leadership qualities, accomplishments, crisis management, political skill, appointments, and character and integrity) and the results were tabulated to create the overall ranking.
[non-primary source needed] A 2005 presidential poll was conducted by James Lindgren for the Federalist Society and The Wall Street Journal.
[13][14] As in the 2000 survey, the editors sought to balance the opinions of liberals and conservatives, adjusting the results "to give Democratic- and Republican-leaning scholars equal weight".
[13] In 2008, The Times daily newspaper of London asked eight of its own "top international and political commentators" to rank all 42 presidents "in order of greatness".
In the survey, each historian rates each president on a scale of one ("not effective") to 10 ("very effective") on presidential leadership in ten categories: Public Persuasion, Crisis Leadership, Economic Management, Moral Authority, International Relations, Administrative Skills, Relations with Congress, Vision/Setting An Agenda, Pursued Equal Justice for All and Performance Within the Context of His Times—with each category equally weighed.
[22] A 2015 poll administered by the American Political Science Association (APSA) among political scientists specializing in the American presidency had Abraham Lincoln in the top spot, with George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, Andrew Jackson, and Woodrow Wilson making the top 10.
[24][25] A second Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey was sent to members of the Presidents and Executive Politics section of the APSA in 2018.
[30] The 2018 Siena poll of 157 presidential scholars reported George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Thomas Jefferson as the top five US presidents, with SCRI director Don Levy stating, "The top five, Mount Rushmore plus FDR, is carved in granite with presidential historians".
Source:[43] In September/October 2010, the United States Presidency Centre (USPC) of the Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of London surveyed 47 British specialists on American history and politics.
Morgan believes it is likely that Roosevelt's ranking (which only marginally surpassed Lincoln's) rose because the poll was conducted during the worst economic troubles since the 1930s.
Lyndon Johnson (1963–1969) "would have been placed much higher in recognition of his civil rights achievement but for the corrosive effect of Vietnam on his foreign policy and moral authority scores."
The minimum number of responses (62) were for the rather obscure and inconsequential presidents Hayes, Arthur, Cleveland, and Benjamin Harrison.
[48] Presidents can be ranked twice since "White supremacist" refers only to personal belief; while the other categories incorporate policy actions as well.
"[52] A Gallup poll taken on November 19–21, 2010, asked 1,037 Americans to say, based on what they know or remember about the nine most recent former presidents, whether they approve or disapprove of how each handled his job in office.
[53] A Gallup poll about presidential greatness taken February 2–5, 2011, asked 1,015 American adults the following question: "Who do you regard as the greatest United States president?
[56] A Quinnipiac University poll taken June 24–30, 2014, asked 1,446 American registered voters who they believed were the best and worst presidents since World War II.
"[64] In November 2014, Henry L. Roediger III and K. Andrew DeSoto published a study in the journal Science asking research subjects to name as many presidents as possible.
"[68] Political scientist Walter Dean Burnham described "dichotomous or schizoid profiles" of presidents, making some hard to classify in his opinion.
Historian and political scientist James MacGregor Burns observed of Nixon: "How can one evaluate such an idiosyncratic president, so brilliant and so morally lacking?
Kennedy remarked, "No one has a right to grade a president—even poor James Buchanan—who has not sat in his chair, examined the mail and information that came across his desk, and learned why he made his decisions.
Presidents have traditionally been ranked on personal qualities and their leadership ability to solve problems that move the nation in a positive direction.
He gives as an example of this difference a comparison between two contemporary studies, a 1996 New York Times poll by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., where 31 white historians and one black historian ranked presidents as "Great", "Near Great", "High Average", "Average", "Below Average", or "Failure", and a survey performed by professors Hanes Walton Jr. and Robert Smith and featured in their book American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom, where 44 African-American political scientists and historians ranked presidents as "White Supremacist", "Racist", "Racially Neutral", "Racially Ambivalent", or "Antiracist".
[73] A 2012 analysis by Mark Zachary Taylor faulted presidential surveys with "partisan bias and subjective judgments", suggesting an algorithm to rank of the presidents based on objectively measurable economic statistics.
In reviewing his 2010 book, Michael Genovese says, "Felzenberg is upset—with some justification—at the liberal bias he sees as so prevalent in the ranking of U.S. presidents by historians and political scientists.
