All the U.S. Presidents, Ranked by “Greatness”
A visualization of the 2018 Presidents & Executive Politics Presidential Greatness Survey
At 5 feet and 4 inches, President James Madison was the shortest of all U.S. presidents. The youngest was President John F. Kennedy, who entered office at the age of 43. And President William Harrison served in the office for the shortest term at 31 days. This much, everyone can agree on.
But who was the greatest?
This question was posed to 170 current and recent members of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association — a group of social science experts in presidential politics. These political scientists scored each president’s “greatness” on a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 being a failure, 50 being average and 100 being great.
The survey scores were compiled and reported by political scientists Brandon Rottinghaus of the University of Houston, and Justin S. Vaughn of Boise State University. Their findings were released earlier this year in a white paper report titled, “Official Results of the 2018 Presidents & Executive Politics Presidential Greatness Survey.”
I compiled some of the data from that report and graphed it — see below.
Some may say that the results are obviously skewed by the liberal biases of the academics who participated in the survey, and those people would probably be right. Of the respondents, 57.2% identified as Democrats, while only 12.7% as Republicans. Similarly, 58.4% considered themselves to be liberal, while 17.4% considered themselves to be conservative (the balance being independents or moderates).
However, being the objectively-minded academics that they are, the authors of this report parsed this data and provided separate reports for how each president was rated by the survey respondents on the left and right side of the political fence. I incorporated this data in the graph above by averaging the scores for republican/conservative respondents and democrat/liberal respondents, and then used those averages for the error bars. This establishes a possible range of scoring for each president among the liberal and conservative respondents, and gives you some idea of what the highest or lowest possible rating could be for a given president in this poll based on the range of biases that exists among those who were surveyed.
Of course, right-leaning respondents generally rated republican presidents higher than left-leaning respondents, and vice-versa. But there were some exceptions. Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Andrew Jackson, James Polk, Ulysses Grant and Grover Cleveland were each rated more favorably by respondents who identified with the opposing political party. One thing these presidents have in common is that they are all considered to be above average, with scores above 50.
It should be noted that because the survey was taken in December 2017 or January 2018, Donald Trump was only rated on his first year in office. This means that unlike the other presidents, he can still do something during the next couple years to improve his legacy. Also, this survey was done previously four years ago, and since then Barack Obama has moved up 10 spots, while Bill Clinton and Andrew Jackson dropped 5 and 6 spots, respectively.
I recommend checking out the full report with all the details here. It also incudes rankings of the most polarizing presidents, and the presidents most deserving of Mt. Rushmore status.
For comparison, see also the Siena College U.S. Presidents Study, which produces a similar ranking of presidential greatness.
