A New York Times story yesterday said that the conservative organization PragerU had just released ratings of the American presidents, and that their top scores went to Washington, Lincoln, Reagan, and Calvin Coolidge. In contrast, a survey of members of the Presidents and Executive Politics section of the American Political Science Association in 2017-8 placed Lincoln, Washington, FDR, and Teddy Roosevelt at the top. PragerU suggested that the differences reflected politics: "most presidential rankings have come from a narrow, left-leaning perspective." However, although the APSA sample was mostly Democrats, 13% were Republicans and 30% were independents or other parties. It's possible to calculate the scores for respondents of each party from the information in this paper by Brandon Rottinghaus, George Eady, and Justin Vaughn. The figure shows the mean rating for each president among Democrats and Republicans in the APSA sample.
The next difference shows the difference between the PragerU and APSA Republican ratings by president in chronological order.**
The PragerU respondents gave higher ratings to almost all of the 18th and 19th century presidents: 18 of the first 21 presidents were rated higher in the PragerU surveys. Starting with McKinley (elected in 1896), there's more variation. Coolidge is rated 24.9 points higher in the Prager survey, by far the largest positive difference (Harding is second with 15.1). Reagan is also rated higher, but it's not an especially big gap--only the 10th largest positive difference. On the other side, Wilson, FDR, Johnson, and Obama are rated far lower by the Prager respondents.
What accounts for these differences between two samples of Republicans? One factor is that the the Prager respondents are probably more conservative than the APSA Republicans. The other is that although Prager says that "we reached out to scholars and experts," many of their respondents are journalists, political activists, or talk show hosts, and most of the academics don't seem to focus on the presidency. Rather than "experts", I'd call them "intellectuals" in Hayek's sense of "second-hand dealers in ideas." An idea that has become popular on the right is that early in the 20th century, progressives set aside the Constitution and established the "administrative state." Wilson is the leading villain in this story, but T. Roosevelt and Taft are also implicated, and the Prager respondents rate them lower than APSA Republicans do. On the other side, Coolidge gets credit for fighting a last-ditch effort to protect the Constitution. This account hasn't trickled down from leading conservative scholars--it's developed within the movement. I think the case illustrates a more general point. A passage from Keynes is often quoted: "The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. . . . Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back." He's right about the power of ideas, but often (usually?) those ideas don't come from economists and political philosophers, but from journalists, popular historians, and freelancers. In fact, sometimes academics (not so much economists, but other social scientists) find themselves following the same influences.
* Prager didn't ask about Trump and the APSA survey took place before Biden became president, so they are excluded. Prager also omitted Garfield and William Henry Harrison, who only served briefly.
**Prager ratings were on a 0-10 scale and the APSA ratings were 0-100. For this comparison, I converted the Prager ratings to 0-100.
No comments:
Post a Comment