The History News Network has published the results of an informal survey of historians and found George Bush to be a failure (tip to Instapundit) [ — a 2004 study that Instapundit recently linked, but did not say was newly published].
With Steve Calabresi, in 2000 I wrote up the results of a survey of politically balanced panels of historians, political scientists, and law professors for the Wall Street Journal, an article in Constitutional Commentary, and a chapter in Presidential Leadership (a Wall Street Journal book edited by James Taranto and Leonard Leo).
One thing became clear to me: for recent presidents, such as Bill Clinton, any ratings reflect more the political makeup of the rating panel than judgments about the president being rated.
I replicated this study this year for a revised version of Presidential Leadership due out this fall (we added economists this time).
The political split I find in rating recent presidents means that it is likely that the HNN study merely tells us what the political orientation of their pool is.
This is a measurement issue. You may think you are measuring GW Bush, but you are really measuring the politics of the panel surveyed. I am not saying that, if someone were to do a representative study of historians, they wouldn’t find Bush a failure (given the political makeup of the profession, they probably would); what I am saying is that this result would be determined by the politics of the raters, not GW Bush’s successes or failures.
In rating presidents, one should either politically balance panels or measure the politics of the raters and assess their impact on the ratings — or both (the informal HNN survey does neither). Otherwise, you are not measuring what you think you are measuring.
Our new 2005 study should be released in the early fall as part of a revised version of Presidential Leadership. Sorry, I can’t release the results. You’ll have to wait another few months to learn how a politically balanced panel of historians [and politics, economics, and law scholars] rate GW Bush.
UPDATE: Jonathan Dresner emailed me to point out that the study was published on HNN in 2004. When I first looked at the HNN report yesterday, I saw the large print that said “May 25, 2005” at the top of the HNN page and missed the smaller print that said “5-17-04” right below it. I just corrected the title of this post and also added the year to the first sentence.
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