The Historical Memory of American Presidents in the Mass Public

Jeffrey E. Cohen
Additional contact information
Jeffrey E. Cohen: Department of Political Science, Fordham University, Bronx, NY 10458, USA

Social Sciences, 2018, vol. 7, issue 3, 1-14

Abstract: This paper investigates public evaluations of past presidents. Since voters generally lack much historical knowledge, such evaluations are not useful indicators of the performance and effectiveness of presidents across history, unlike the greatness evaluations of experts, like historians and presidency scholars. Still, presidents may be concerned about how future generations of voters will think about them. These anticipations may then affect presidential behavior in office. This study uses a Rasmussen poll in 2007 that asked voters their assessment of all the past presidents, from George Washington through to George W. Bush. Results find that voters look upon past presidents more favorably as a larger number of voters have opinions about the president, presidents of the founding generation are looked upon more favorably, and the ratings of experts affect voters’ assessments of past presidents. The conclusion discusses the implications of the results and offers suggestions for future research.

Keywords: presidential rankings; mass public; presidential greatness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/7/3/36/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/7/3/36/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jscscx:v:7:y:2018:i:3:p:36-:d:134439

Access Statistics for this article

Social Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Yvonne Chu

More articles in Social Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().