Presidential scholars and baseball writers debate who were the greatest. While baseball analysis evolved from qualitative impressions of “experts” to rigorous, data-driven “sabermetrics,” analysis of presidential greatness continues to rely on “old-school” reputational rankings based on surveys of scholars’ qualitative assessments. Presidential-congressional relations and baseball are all about winning, but what fans (of sports and politics) find most intriguing is Wins Above Expectations (WAE)—did the team do better or worse than expected? This paper adapts the Pythagorean Expectations (PE) formula developed to analyze baseball to assess legislative success of presidents from Eisenhower to Obama. A parsimonious regression model and the PE formula predict annual success rates with 90% accuracy. The estimates of WAE from the two approaches, however, are uncorrelated. Regression analysis does not identify any president who systematically exceeded expectations, but sabermetric analysis indicates that Republican presidents outperform Democrats. Neither approach correlates with recent presidential greatness rankings.

Is the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) a legitimate organization? Do the veto powers legitimately pursue international security, or do they protect their narrow national interests? One way to evaluate the legitimacy of the UNSC is through its agenda. Does it address the most significant conflicts in world politics? Or is it influenced by the national interests of the veto powers? This article addresses these questions with a dataset that includes the number of UNSC meetings held and resolutions passed on 40 conflicts from 1991 to 2013. This analysis provides evidence for the legitimacy of the UNSC—conflicts with more refugees and more deaths are significantly more likely to be on the agenda. The analysis does not support critics of the UNSC—the national interests of the veto powers, measured as arms sales to and trade with the conflict participants, do not significantly alter the UNSC agenda.

Academic and popular accounts hold that celebrity activists command the attention of political elites. One manifestation of this idea is that celebrities garner greater congressional attention at committee hearings than the substantive experts who typically serve as witnesses. This implies that Members of Congress do not value interaction with experts and are willing to forego those interactions to allocate time to activities with low opportunity costs—activities unimportant enough that they can be passed up for a celebrity encounter. To evaluate these claims, we examined hearing attendance during a 20-year period. We found that celebrity witnesses have little effect on member attendance rates, which suggests that celebrities are a less efficacious route to congressional attention than is commonly believed.