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18. RANKING CHICAGO'S MAYORS: MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL, WHO IS THE GREATEST OFTHEM ALL?-AN UPDATED POLL Melvin G. Holli Who is number one? Who has been the best mayor in Chicago's history? The age-old question was addressed in a new survey completed in fall 2002. The poll asked Chicago experts in history and politics to rank all ofChicago's mayors from the very first in 1837 down through the 2002 incumbent, Richard M. Daley. Expert rankings ofpolitical leaders date back to a 1948 poll conducted by Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., who asked fifty-five expert historians to rate U.S. presidents on a scale from "failure" to "great," with each historian using his own criteria. Schlesinger repeated his exercise in 1962, with results largely confirming his earlier findings. More recently, a Murray-Blessing poll asked American historians to rate presidents, and in 1982, a Steve Neal-Chicago Tribune survey queried some forty-nine prominent historians and authors, all of whom had published some germinal work on the presidency, for the purpose of ranking American presidents. Neal, the Chicago Sun-Times, the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2000 conducted similar surveys, and so did C-SPAN television.The findings, with a few exceptions, were very similar to those of the earlier Schlesinger polls.1 One surprising result of these national surveys is that in most cases, the ranking of a president appears to become fixed within a relatively short period after he leaves office. Whether the same pattern will obtain for our mayors was a question we raised in the first-ever expert poll about Chicago mayors in 1985 263 MELVIN G. BOLLI (published in the first edition ofthis book) and one that this survey will speak to later. For the moment, it is important to note there exist a body of research and a methodology for grading elected political leaders. Methodology The second effort to rate Chicago's forty-three elected mayors who served since the city's incorporation in 1837 relied on the same methodology used in the 1985 Chicago survey, was conducted in 1994, and was published in the Roper Center's The Public Perspective journal. The results of the 1994 survey were similar to those of the first expert poll conducted in 1985. Now we are reporting on the third expert poll to rank Chicago's mayors. There are some similarities: Retrospectively, poll number two in 1994 had fifty-five respondents. By the time expert poll number three was conducted in the summer and fall of 2002, a few of the earlier poll respondents were deceased and several had retired or moved from the Chicago metro area and Illinois. The result was a total of thirty-two expert respondents. Even though this number is substantially smaller than that of the earlier survey, the new poll is a good representative sample of Chicago political experts, as shown in the variety of disciplines, articles, books, and other publications represented by these men and women. Also, twenty-eight of the thirty-two experts had been respondents in the first two Chicago mayor rankings.2 Rankings were solicited by means of a questionnaire mailed between June and November 2002 to sixty potential respondents. This mailing elicited a response from thirty-two, for a rate of return of 53 percent. A one-half or greater response level is considered reliable for mail surveys and compares favorably to other polls of this type.3 Repeated mailings were made to nonrespondents and to those who had changed addresses. That twenty-eight of the respondents in the new poll had also been respondents in the first polls in 1985 and 1994 accounts for a repeat percentage that is very high for such a survey. The thirty-two experts who returned questionnaires clearly seemed qualified for the task, for as a group they had published fifty-eight books and more than 150 articles related to Chicago and its politics. On average, each expert has published five articles and one book. Only one had not published print articles or books but had delivered analyses through electronic broadcast media and in lecture forums. Our expert respondents seemed well qualified by their formal credentials to rate Chicago mayors. The survey instrument had three components. The first question asked each respondent to rank Chicago's eight mayors who served since 1933 and to judge them on three different dimensions, namely, leadership, accomplishments , and political skill. A second asked the respondents to rank the...

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