The polls: presidential greatness as seen in the mass public: an extension and application of the Simonton model.: An article from: Presidential Studies Quarterly

This digital document is an article from Presidential Studies Quarterly, published by Center for the Study of the Presidency on December 1, 2003. The length of the article is 5215 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the author: I raise two questions in this article. In light of the scandals of the Clinton years, have the standards used to rate presidents changed or not? Second, do experts and informed citizens rate presidents similarly, and do they rely on the same criteria in their ratings? I use a C-SPAN poll administered in 2000 to experts, and through the Internet to the citizenry, as the data to address these questions. Results find great temporal stability in how presidents are rated. Furthermore, in applying a predictive model developed by Simonton, I find stability in the factors that predict presidential greatness ratings. In particular, experts and informed citizens rate presidents similarly and use similar criteria. Substantively, the most important and consistent predictor of presidential greatness is the number of years that the president served in office. This finding brings us full circle to a question that motivates much scholarship on the presidency: why do presidents get reelected for a second term?

Citation Details
Title: The polls: presidential greatness as seen in the mass public: an extension and application of the Simonton model.
Author: Jeffrey E. Cohen
Publication:Presidential Studies Quarterly (Refereed)
Date: December 1, 2003
Publisher: Center for the Study of the Presidency
Volume: 33 Issue: 4 Page: 913(12)

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