ABSTRACT
The American presidency is an excellent source of material for studying the appeal and performance of political leaders. Motivation focuses on the broad classes of people's goals and goal-directed actions, and so it is a component of personality that is especially important to the relations between leaders and followers. Presidential leadership performance, however, is a very different matter. Presidential appeal, defined in terms of electoral success, is significantly correlated with the congruence or match between the president's motive profile and that of his contemporary society. One approach to measuring presidential greatness is to rely on the judgments of scholars of American history. Presidential appeal, as measured by success at both election and re-election, is a straightforward function of how congruent the president's motive levels were with those of the American society of the time. Neither presidential power motivation nor power minus affiliation-intimacy, by itself, was related to any aspect of political appeal.
