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Presidential historians and baseball writers perennially debate who the best of all time were. Over the past three decades, baseball analysis evolved from a largely qualitative and impressionistic to rigorous and data-driven. Long scorned by "old-school" baseball writers, the new "Sabermetric" approach to baseball analysis is now recognized--albeit grudgingly by some--as a powerful and useful way to assess teams, players, and managers with precision and depth across time. Adapting the Pythagorean Expectations (PE) formula developed by Bill James (1982) to analyze baseball, this paper uses sabermetric analysis to assess American presidential success at winning legislative victories in Congress from Eisenhower to Obama. In particular, we observe that presidential-congressional relations, like baseball, is all about winning. What a baseball manager needs from his players is runs: his hitters must score runs; his fielders must prevent them. What the president needs from members of Congress is votes: he must get members to vote for his favored legislation and against legislation he opposes. But important as winning is, what professional observers (sports writers and political scientists) really find most intriguing is Wins Above Expectations (WAE)--did the team do better or worse than expected? Our analysis of presidential roll-calls from 1953-2014 shows that a sabermetric analysis formula predicts annual presidential success rates with 90 percent accuracy. Moreover, WAE variation across presidencies reveals clear patterns of presidential success in Congress, offering an objective means of determining who belongs in the presidential politics "Hall of Fame." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his classic Bureaucracy, James Q. Wilson observes that transformational leadership in public administration is “…so heavily dependent on executive interests and beliefs as to make the chance appearance of a change-oriented personality enormously important in explaining change.” He pessimistically concludes that, “it is not easy to build a useful social science theory out of ‘chance appearances’.” But what if a change-oriented bureaucrat’s appearance at the top of an organization is not due to random chance? This paper argues that the personalities of bureaucratic agency heads are systematic consequences of professional career systems. Data are drawn from a behavioral survey and psychological probes of police chiefs serving American municipalities. I show that government hiring and promotional policies and the adaptive behaviors of professionals lead to distinct patterns of executive personality and, ultimately, political leadership in the bureaucracy. Over time, career mobility favors achievement-motivated individuals, who Wilson might say have “change-oriented personalities.” ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]