Presidential greatness in the black press: ranking the modern presidents on civil rights policy and race relations, 1900–2016

ABSTRACT

Rankings of presidential leadership based on retrospective surveys of experts are a staple of the literature on American politics. We develop an alternative method – the editorial opinion score (EOS) – for ranking the leadership of the modern presidents based on content analyses of editorials published in African-American newspapers between 1901 and 2016. The advantage of the EOS method over retrospective surveys is that it provides real-time evaluations of presidential leadership over multiple issue areas. We make leadership in the areas of civil rights policy and race relations the key component of our ranking of the modern presidents. Finally, we use regression analyses to determine the contextual factors shape editorial opinions of presidential leadership in these areas. The end result of our analyses is a significant reordering of extant presidential rankings.

KEYWORDS:

• Presidents
• presidential rankings
• black newspapers
• civil rights
• Barack Obama
• race relations

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Cailyn Shin, Jessica Zawadzki, Kevin Russell, Andrene Wright, Jamal Julien, Hansuh Rhee, Gabriela Dago, and Xavier Scruggs for research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See Brooks (2009), Tesler and Sear (2010), Dawson (2011), Harris (2012), Greer (2016), Simien (2015), and Price (2016) for exemplary studies in this new literature.

2. Our decision to make editorials our recording units for this project reflects our belief that these items lend themselves to syntactical distinctions. Krippendorff (2004) describes “syntactical distinctions as ‘natural’ relative to the grammar of the medium of the data” (104).

3. We calculated the alpha statistics using the ReCal2: Reliability Calculator Program (Freelon 2010) and STATA 14 statistical software package.

4. See Nichols (2012) for an excellent discussion of fit of the baseline model across various survey-based rankings.