Understanding and evaluating presidents poses problems for political
scientists because only one president serves at time and since each president faces
very different challenges. Political scientists call this the one-n problem. Because
the circumstances of a presidency have a tremendous impact on the success and
failure of that presidency, determining whether a president was good or bad is
difficult, particularly when we start comparing presidents. Only Franklin Roosevelt
was president at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, for example, and only
Abraham Lincoln was president during the Civil War. How can one judge, then, how
Lincoln would have handled Pearl Harbor or FDR the Civil War?
Factors Contributing to Success and Failure
Many factors affect how successful a president will be:
-
Strong leadership: The ability to rally people behind him
-
Congress: The ability to control or persuade members of
Congress
-
Popularity: The ability to convince others to do as he
wishes
Decision-Making Analysis
Decision-making analysis explores the methods and circumstances under
which key decisions are made. Graham T. Allison’s Essence of Decision:
Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (1971) is a famous example.
Allison sought to understand the decisions made by the inner circle of the
Kennedy Administration (and to a lesser extent, by the Soviets) during the
crisis in 1962. He devised three models, all of which explain parts of the
decision-making process:
-
The rational actor model: Decision makers act in a
rational manner: They gather all the evidence, weigh their options, and make
an informed choice.
-
The organizational process model: The structure of
organizations shapes how decisions are made.
-
The bureaucratic politics model: Leaders of different
organizations are in competition with one another, and that affects how
decisions are made.
Another decision-making model—known as the groupthink approach—examines
how group dynamics can affect decision outcomes. According to this model, under
some circumstances, group members reinforce one another’s faulty reasoning,
leading to disastrous decisions.
Psychological Analysis
Psychological approaches seek to understand the inner workings of the
president’s mind and how they affect decision-making. Some psychological
accounts are simplistic, but others are serious studies of presidential
character. James Barber’s bivariate typology is a prominent example. Barber
argues that presidents should be evaluated based on how active a role they
should play in initiating policies (active or passive) and how they view
themselves and their status as president (positive or negative). Combining these
two variables, we get four categories of presidents: passive-positive,
passive-negative, active-positive, and active-negative. Barber claims that
active-positive presidents are likely the best, whereas active-negative can be
disastrous.
BARBER’S CATEGORIZATIONS OF PRESIDENTS
|
Active
|
Passive
|
Positive
| Franklin Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, John F.
Kennedy | Ronald Reagan, William Howard Taft, James
Madison |
Negative
| Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Herbert Hoover, Woodrow
Wilson | George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, George H. W.
Bush |
Historical Comparison
Some scholars compare presidents by the role they play in history. For
example, some see FDR as particularly significant because he framed the terms of
debate in the United States for decades to come. Other studies examine the
lasting impact a president had by studying how much of what he did survived
their presidencies. Again FDR is significant under this criteria because his New
Deal still exists.