Presidential Greatness

How Americans Think about It and How Political Scientists Measure It

Prof. Justin S. Vaughn/Boise State University

Debates about presidential greatness have been with us for decades, facilitated by numerous systematic surveys. However, the voice of political scientists has been relatively muted in such debates, in particular if compared with the role that historians have had in making these determinations, Prof. Vaughn’s lecture introduces and assesses results of a recent effort to capture the attitudes of political science presidency experts about presidential greatness.

Justin S. Vaughn is an associate professor of political science and director of the Center for Idaho History and Politics at Boise State University. He is a coauthor of Czars in the White House (U of Michigan Press, 2015) and co-editor of Controlling the Message: New Media in American Political Campaigns (NYU Press, 2015); The Rhetoric of Heroic Expectations: Establishing the Obama Presidency (Texas A&M UP, 2014); and Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (UP of Kentucky, 2012).