Today the Siena Research Institute (SRI) published a list of the best and worst U.S. Presidents, based on a survey of “238 presidential scholars, historians and political scientists that responded via mail or web to an invitation to participate.”
The report has stirred up a lot of commentary in the media, mostly partisan and focused on whether pundits agree with the rankings of recent Presidents.
What’s most interesting to me, though, is the detailed, dimensionalized data that SRI released alongside the report. The survey respondents were asked to rank each President in 20 different categories.
With this categorized data available, I wondered: What specific leadership qualities mattered most in these experts’ overall perception of a President?
To find out, I loaded the data into a spreadsheet and computed the correlation (R-squared for a linear, best-fit trendline) between each individual category and the overall Presidential rankings.
| Category | Correlation with Overall Rank (0 = no correlation, 1 = highest possible correlation) |
|---|---|
| Background (Family, Education, Experience) | 0.41 |
| Party Leadership | 0.68 |
| Communication Ability (Speaking, Writing) | 0.82 |
| Relationship with Congress | 0.75 |
| Court Appointments | 0.78 |
| Handling of U.S. Economy | 0.78 |
| Luck | 0.57 |
| Ability to Compromise | 0.58 |
| Willingness to Take Risks | 0.71 |
| Executive Appointments | 0.85 |
| Overall Ability | 0.92 |
| Imagination | 0.85 |
| Domestic Accomplishments | 0.93 |
| Integrity | 0.41 |
| Executive Ability | 0.93 |
| Foreign Policy Accomplishments | 0.74 |
| Leadership Ability | 0.88 |
| Intelligence | 0.65 |
| Avoidance of Crucial Mistakes | 0.66 |
| Respondents’ Present Overall View | 0.97 |
My own interpretation of what these correlations mean:
- First of all, when the survey respondents were asked to provide a single, overall ranking of each President (the “Present Overall View” category), the results were very highly correlated with the derived ranking computed from all the other categories (“Overall Rank”). This indicates to me that each respondent was self-consistent and didn’t, for example, give poor per-category rankings to some President whom they named best overall.
- Background (Family, Education, Experience) mattered relatively little. To me, that’s refreshing: in a true land of opportunity, someone with potential should be able to succeed regardless of background.
- Some personality characteristics widely regarded as virtues–Integrity, Intelligence, and Ability to Compromise–had surprisingly low correlations with Overall Rank. On the whole, it seems, results mattered more than style.
- Domestic Accomplishments were more strongly correlated with Overall Rank than Foreign Policy Accomplishments.
- Luck had one of the lower correlations, suggesting that the particular set of circumstances that fate presented to each President was less important than that President’s handling of the crises and opportunities.
Based on SRI’s survey data, the archetype of a historically well-regarded U.S. President seems to be a skilled organizational manager and good communicator who delivers results on domestic issues. I see parallels to how corporate CEOs are judged, too: imagination and leadership capabilities are valued highly, and results (Domestic Accomplishments in this survey, quarterly earnings in the corporate world) are paramount.
I’d love to hear some feedback from folks in other countries: do people judge leaders by the same criteria worldwide, or does it vary from place to place?
