Gallup’s interactive “Presidential Job Approval Center” has some great tools, but using their widget, one can only compare four trend lines (ie., the job approval ratings of four presidents) at a time — it would be nice to see a more comprehensive visual comparison. Using Gallup’s data, I played around in Excel and Illustrator and created the following chart.

The chart details each president’s job approval at 460 days in office (the length of Obama’s current tenure), each president’s all-time high and all-time low approval rating, and average approval rating. You can tell at a glance which presidents experienced the most tumultuous terms: Truman, LBJ, Nixon, and G.W. Bush each have wide spans from highest to lowest approval ratings, and quite different “current” (460 days in) ratings than their eventual averages.

Our new Visual History of the American Presidency contains a column in which the presidents are ranked on a one- to five-star scale; I included our rankings in the chart below, along the x-axis (there are no five-star-ranked presidents in this time period).

Click to view full size.

So what do you think? Is this chart a useful visualization of Gallup’s data? Did we get the rankings right?

The political controversies surrounding Obama’s recent spate of recess appointments made us wonder how President Obama compares to other past presidents and their recess appointments. Looking at a simple bar chart graphing recess appointments since FDR, it’s not surprising to see that current complainants are taking a shortsighted approach to the issue. Click on the chart below to see a full-sized version.

UPDATE: As per some Facebook users’ suggestions, I’ve created a better chart that now controls for length of time in office. The chart below compares the presidents by ratio of days in office to total recess appointments. Quite a difference! Click to see a full-sized version:

(Thanks to Beth at the Senate Historical Office for sending over the data within minutes of my research request — impressive response time!)