Siena Tracking Study"Between 1982 and 1994, the Siena Research Institute completed and released three Presidential Ratings Studies. Each was administered approximately one year after the inauguration of a new president. For the first of the three presidents, Ronald Reagan, we currently have ratings one year into his first term, one year after he left office, and five years after his presidency ended. We also have the appropriate parallel studies for George Bush and Bill Clinton. It is our intention to continue these tracking surveys, at the same intervals, with each change of administration. The next Siena Research Institute study is scheduled for January 2002. The survey is one of expert opinion, solicited from academic historians and political scientists throughout the United States. Rather than solicit their views on which president was "great," or a "failure" as has become the custom, we created, in 1980, what we believe to be a more objective rating scale. We established twenty separate categories, ranging from foreign policy to party leadership (see Table One), and asked our responding experts to rank each president in each category on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being poor and 5 outstanding. The resulting responses thus form a matrix of numbers-currently 20 by 41. We then averaged all of the responses, converted the 1-5 scale to percentages, and produced the final rankings* (see Table Two). We thus create an overall ranking for each president, from Franklin D. Roosevelt as first to Warren G. Harding as forty-first in 1994. In addition, we have rankings that are question-specific in each category (e.g., "luck" with Ronald Reagan first and Herbert Hoover forty-first, in 1994)".

President	1982	1990	1994
Washington	4	4	4
J. Adams	10	14	12
Jefferson	2	3	5
Madison	9	8	9
Monroe	15	11	15
J. Q. Adams	17	16	17
Jackson	13	9	11
Van Buren	21	21	22
W. Harrison	26	35	28
Tyler	34	33	34
Polk	12	13	14
Taylor	29	34	33
Fillmore	32	32	35
Pierce	35	36	37
Buchanan	37	38	39
Lincoln	3	2	2
A. Johnson	38	39	40
Grant	36	37	38
Hayes	22	23	24
Garfield	25	30	26
Arthur	24	26	27
Cleveland	18	17	19
B. Harrison	31	29	30
McKinley	19	19	18
T. Roosevelt	5	5	3
Taft	20	20	21
Wilson	6	6	6
Harding	39	40	41
Coolidge	30	31	36
Hoover	27	28	29
F. Roosevelt	1	1	1
Truman	7	7	7
Eisenhower	11	12	8
Kennedy	8	10	10
L. Johnson	14	15	13
Nixon	28	25	23
Ford	23	27	32
Carter	33	24	25
Reagan	16	22	20
Bush	-	18	31
Clinton	-	-	16

"Finally, it is of course necessary to recognize that the man and the era, or events, must meet if true greatness is even to be possible. It is self-evident that Washington, Lincoln, and FDR all faced enormous challenges. To succeed was to triumph, to fail was to be politically inept or ignoble. Similarly, if the challenges that faced Jefferson and TR were slightly less daunting, they were nevertheless very real and each of them (rounding out the consistent top five in our surveys) led the country not only into a new century but into a new era of highly significant change. It would probably be true to suggest that one or more "average" presidents might have emerged in "great" or "near great" ranking had his era furnished him with dynamic challenges or exceptional opportunities. In their absence, talent, intellect, ability, skills-none are adequate. In ranking great presidents one is compelled to keep in mind the old cliche of political conventions, 'The man and the moment have met'."