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The Contemporary Presidency : And We Will Know Their Greatness by the Trail of Controversy: Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt and Their Increasingly Contested Successors
Author(s) -
GRENDSTAD GUNNAR
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
presidential studies quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.337
H-Index - 5
eISSN - 1741-5705
pISSN - 0360-4918
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-5705.2008.02656.x
Subject(s) - presidential system , presidency , greatness , george (robot) , political science , environmental ethics , law , history , politics , philosophy , art , art history , literature
Presidential scholars hypothesize that presidential contestedness increases among recent presidents only because of unfinished research or within historical eras because of growing governing problems. Applying unused data from studies of scholarly assessments of presidential performance, this analysis disconfirms the recency hypothesis and confirms the era hypothesis. Presidential contestedness increases after each of the least contested presidents: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Uncontestedness is a hard act to follow.