Newswise — In the highly polarized political climate of the modern United States, liberals and conservatives seem worlds apart from each other when it comes to their political preferences.
But as a political scientist versed in executive power has found, there’s a high level of agreement: people on both sides of the divide, regardless of ideological differences, want a president with the same basic personality traits — boldness, charisma, intelligence, and those who don’t seek the middle ground.
Daniel P. Franklin is an associate professor of political science at Georgia State University, and is an expert on executive power, political culture, presidential legacies, and the relationships between the presidency and Congress. He is available for comment, and his contact information is in the contact box above, visible to registered and logged-in users of the Newswise system.
He is the author of “Pitiful Giants: Presidents in their Final Term” (Palgrave MacMillian, 2014). It explores the approaches U.S. presidents elected to a second term after World War II have taken to executive actions, including Eisenhower, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama, during their final years in power.
At the Midwest Political Science Association in 2015, Franklin presented a paper wherein he essentially “reverse engineered” a number of different presidential rankings — ranking the presidents from “best” to “worst” — to determine if there was an ideological bias in Americans’ preferences for presidents.
“In other words, I was looking for what conservatives and liberals want in a leader,” he said. “What I found was something of a surprise. There is in fact little variation in what we all want in a president – rather, there is a high level of agreement.”
Presidential greatness, Franklin said, is a “product of bluster and circumstance.”
“Presidents who serve in quiet times are less well regarded, mainly because they didn’t ‘luck’ into a war — I count Theodore Roosevelt among this number,” he said. “But presidential greatness is also, it seems, a product of bluster and boldness. Why else was Andrew Jackson placed on the $20 bill?”
To read the paper, visit https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280310362_What_do_Conservatives_and_Liberals_Want_Presidential_Rankings_as_a_Reflection_of_Contemporary_Ideological_Bias.
Additionally, an updated edition of Franklin’s “Politics and Film: The Political Culture of Television and Movies” (Rowman & Littlefield) will be released later this summer, to include examinations of what films and television shows like American Sniper, House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, and Twelve Years a Slave tell us about popular conceptions of government, the military, intelligence and terrorism, punishment and policing, and recognized mistakes in our shared history.
For more about Franklin, including his CV and a list of his other publications, visit http://politicalscience.gsu.edu/profile/daniel-p-franklin/.
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