SIGN IN
Email
This field is required Password This field is required Sign in
Remember me
Forgot ID or Password?
|
||
War and Presidential GreatnessDavid R. HendersonNaval Postgraduate School Zachary GochenourWestern Carolina University - College of Business March 26, 2012 Independent Review 17:4, 2013 Abstract: Historians and journalists commonly survey other historians on the relative 'greatness' of American presidents, and these rankings show remarkable consistency between surveys. In this paper we consider commonalities between highly ranked presidents and compare plausible determinants of greatness according to historians. We find that a strong predictor of greatness is the fraction of American lives lost in war during a president’s tenure. We find this predictor to be robust and compare favorably to other predictors used in previous historical research. We discuss potential reasons for this correlation and conclude with a discussion of how historians’ views might affect policy.
Number of Pages in PDF File: 20 Keywords: American history, presidency, American economic history JEL Classification: N4, H56 Date posted: March 28, 2012 ; Last revised: August 29, 2013Suggested Citation |
|
||||||||||||||||
