Today, on President’s Day, Brandon Rottinghaus and Justin Vaughn discuss their new survey of experts on presidential greatness. They report that while Abraham Lincoln has had a consistent hold on the top ranking, in recent years, Franklin Delano Roosevelt has challenged George Washington for the second spot. They write that the changing rankings of US presidents among experts can give insights into what contemporary scholars consider to be important in US democracy.

This President’s Day we released our third Presidential Greatness Project survey of presidential experts. A time-honored tradition, presidential greatness polls such as ours represent an opportunity for experts – and occasionally everyday voters – to assess the state of the institution and those who have occupied it in an accessible yet compelling way.

Over time, the results of these kinds of surveys have revealed important things about the presidency, from whose presidential reputations were shifting to insights into the values of the experts doing the assessments. The results of this year’s survey are no different, shedding light on continuing reputational dynamics as well as what may be an evolution in how presidential experts assess the presidency.

Looking at the overall results (Table 1), we find that Abraham Lincoln was rated the greatest president, with an average score of 93.9/100 across all respondents, followed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (90.8) and George Washington (90.3). While Lincoln has had a strong hold on the No. 1 ranking for quite some time, in recent years Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) has increasingly challenged George Washington for the No. 2 ranking. Although this apparently marks a shift in scholarly understanding of the presidency, it should not come as a great surprise. After all, FDR was not only the longest serving president, but he also pioneered new ways of communicating with the American people through his radio broadcasted “Fireside Chats,” both reassuring and informing them as he led the nation through challenges such as the Great Depression and World War II. FDR eclipsing Washington in this survey reflects scholarly consensus about his role as the founder of the modern presidency. While Washington was the first president and established many initial norms and practices of the office, it was FDR who presided over the greatest expansion of the presidency, while also leading the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II.

Table 1 – Overall Presidential Greatness Ratings and Rankings and Changes Since 2015

Taking a more contemporary perspective, we also see that current President Joe Biden’s inaugural inclusion in the Presidential Greatness Project’s series of surveys finds him in the top third of presidents, behind his recent Democratic predecessors but ahead of contemporary Republican presidents. Ranked No. 14 with a rating of 62.7/100, his initial rating is higher than Barack Obama’s first in 2015 (58.24) and dramatically different than Donald Trump’s initial rating in 2018 (13.0). In fact, it is not just Biden who enjoys elevated ratings in this survey. In this first post-Trump Presidential Greatness Project survey, we see a significant bump for Democratic Party presidents almost across the board, with each of the recent Democratic presidents moving up in the rankings, while each of the Republican presidents dropped down, apart from President Trump himself, who remained steady at the bottom of the rankings.

Photo by Caleb Fisher on Unsplash

Shifting values mean shifting rankings for presidents.

What is most noteworthy about the remaining presidents concerns how individual reputations have changed over time. Since our initial survey, several presidents have had significant changes in their rankings. Barack Obama has risen nine places (from #16 to #7), as has Ulysses S. Grant (from #26 to #17), while Andrew Jackson has fallen 12 places (from #9 to #21) and Calvin Coolidge has dropped seven spots (from #27 to #34). Most of the time, these changes have not been driven by new revelations about individual presidencies, but rather by shifting values and priorities among the body of scholars doing the assessment. As presidential scholars reassess the impact of the modern presidency, in terms of the administrative and cultural impact of each president, we see significant shifts over time in what constitutes presidential greatness.

Of course, there are some presidents who defy easy assessment. Some presidents are more difficult than others to assess on, even for academic experts, whether because of a dearth of evidence, a lack of scholarly examination, or complexity. To address this, we asked respondents to identify up to five presidents who they believed were particularly challenging to assess and then rank order them with the first president being the most difficult to assess, the second as next most difficult, and so on. We then calculated how many times a president was identified as well as their average ranking (Figure 2).

Figure 2 – Presidential Rating and Ranking

William Henry Harrison is the president our respondents considered most difficult to assess, selected by 92 respondents and earning a 2.1 average (1 is a “most difficult to assess” ranking). The fact that Harrison only served in office for a month makes a robust assessment of his presidential greatness elusive, so it is understandable why our respondents ranked him first. Four of the next five presidents served in that era of the Nineteenth Century where the presidency was comparatively weak and almost a second fiddle to Congress. The difficulty assessing these presidents is not to do with the limited time in office, but rather the limited focus in American history on them or their era of leadership. Finally, coming it at the fifth most difficult to assess president is the current occupant of the Oval Office, Joe Biden. The difficulty assessing him is in large part because his chapter in history is not yet fully written, as well as the fact that the present moment often blinds us to what history later reveals.

Institutional norms are still important

What is easier to assess, however, is that exercises such as this survey are opportunities for us to learn not only about how the individual presidents stack up against one another, but also how the ways in which the metrics driving assessment change. Verbatim responses from scholars in this survey emphasize preservation and attachment to institutional norms. When asked about how they think about presidential “greatness,” scholars noted that great presidents “advance democracy” or “respect and abide by the Constitution and the better angels of our nature.” This lofty West Wing-style assessment of the institutional system broadly gives us a timely window into scholars’ criteria of presidential greatness – at least for the near term.

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About the survey: The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey was conducted online via Qualtrics from November 15 to December 31, 2023. Respondents included current and recent members of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, which is the foremost organization of social science experts in presidential politics, as well as scholars who had recently published peer-reviewed academic research in key related scholarly journals or academic presses. 525 respondents were invited to participate, and 154 usable responses were received, yielding a 29.3% response rate. The primary purpose of this survey was to create a ranking of presidential greatness that covered all presidents from George Washington to Joe Biden. To do this, we asked respondents to rate each president on a scale of 0-100 for their overall greatness, with 0=failure, 50=average, and 100=great. We then averaged the ratings for each president and ranked them from highest average to lowest. Responses where respondent did not confirm they officially agreed to participate were dropped and are not included in the submission figure. Similarly, in the event a respondent completed the survey twice, the second submission was dropped, as was any submission where the respondent did complete the questionnaire through the initial presidential greatness rating sections. Incomplete submissions were otherwise included, with responses being analyzed for those questions where answers were provided.

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