Evaluating Prime Ministerial Leadership in Canada: The Results of an Expert Survey
This article reports the results of the largest survey of expert opinion on prime ministerial leadership in Canada, conducted in 2011. The top-rated prime ministers were, in order, Laurier, King, Macdonald and Pearson, who were preferred because of their creative records of achievement and capacity to see the country whole, champion its unity and make for positive change. Survey respondents valued transformational leadership that altered the country, but did so in a cautious way that did not threaten national cohesiveness. The article makes frequent reference to the international literature on leadership, allowing for comparisons across a range of countries.
The Presidential Performance Study: A Progress Report
The rating of presidents is certainly not one of the more crucial problems confronting American historians. Yet in recent years it is a matter that has received considerable attention. Whatever the historical profession as a whole may think of the exercise, the lay public, particularly the press, is intrigued by how the "experts" view the presidents, and it broadcasts widely any new listing. Rating the holders of this uniquely American office apparently helps remind us of which human qualitites we most admire, since we expect to find in presidents the best in our society. Perhaps, too, the American penchant for always wanting to know who is number one supports such interest. If number one can be determined in athletics, in rental car agencies, and in fast-food chains, why not in the presidency? Recent professional interest in rating the presidents dates from the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., poll of 1948.1 Acting largely on a whim and allowing each respondent wide latitude to choose his own criteria for judging presidential greatness, Schlesinger solicited the opinions of fifty-five "experts," the majority of whom were professional historians. The findings were subsequently published in Life and were immediately embraced by the press as representing the collective judgment of historians everywhere.2 Fourteen years later, Schlesinger repeated the exercise, this time surveying seventy-five experts. Fifty-eight were historians (including most of those polled in 1948), with the remainder mainly being journalists and political scientists. Published in the New York Times Magazine, the findings of this poll generally reinforced those of the earlier one and even more firmly established the Schlesinger
The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders since 1945
Spates among both whites and African Americans during the early twentieth century. She analyLes theatrical productions, pulp fiction, travel literature, histories, anthropological studies, and films concerned with Haiti during the 1920s and 1930s to demonstrate negative white stereotyping of Haitians, and by extension African Americans. Those invariably sensationnlixed works depicted Haiti as an exotic island-termed “America’s Africa” by one observer-whose primitive natives were preoccupied with superstitious voodoo practices and sexual excesses. I b d a explaiiis that the efforts of African American intellectuals, beginning with James Wcldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, were important in presenting more balanced interpretations of the Haitians and their institutionu. In addition, their writings describing Haitian achievements in gaining independence and establishing a black nation in the Wcstcrn Hemisphere enhanced racial pride among African Americans, inspiring them to persevere in their struggle for equal rights. Rentla further contends that the African American presentation o f the Haitian ability to cope with adversity not only bolstered moralc among working-class Americans during the Great Depression but contributed to the transformation of racial politics in subsequent decades.