News / production
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Sep 13, 2012
Judging the worst presidents
What do William Henry Harrison, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Warren Harding have in common? They each earned a one-star rating on our Visual History of the American Presidency.
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Sep 13, 2012
Rating the presidents – what makes a “great” president?
For early reviewers, one of the most controversial sections of A Visual History of the American Presidency was its ranking section. We were often asked: What makes a good president, and how does a good president differ from a great president?
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Sep 13, 2012
The domestic economy and presidential success
In an effort to chart the U.S. economy in relation to each presidency, we did extensive research to determine the best measure of business cycles over time. In the end, the two data points we chose to best represent the ebb and flow of the U.S. economy were the most basic: consumer price index (CPI) and gross domestic product (GDP).
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Sep 13, 2012
Calculating debt as a percentage of GDP
What's a good measure of U.S. debt as a percentage of GDP over time? We take that into our poster History of the American Presidency.
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Sep 13, 2012
Discovering historical trends in presidential vetoes
We work hard to make sure every data set in one of our visualizations tells a compelling story. One of our hardworking and fabulous research assistants recently collected a data set relating to presidential vetoes. The research quickly became much more complicated (and interesting) than we predicted...
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Sep 13, 2012
SCOTUS Sources
BY NGP (Originally published on April 9, 2010) Since we published our approach to A Visual History of the Supreme Court of the United States, we got quite a few requests for the sources of the poster. We decided to publish them here, with links. Comments are welcome! Epstein, Lee, Thomas G. Walker, Nancy Staudt, Scott Hendrickson, and Jason Roberts. (2010). “The U.S. Supreme Court Justices Database.” Chicago, IL: Northwestern University School of Law, January 26. http://epstein.law.northwestern.edu/research/justicesdata.html. Andrew D. Martin and Kevin M. Quinn. 2002. “Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953-1999.”...