Political Intelligence Report

Beyond the economy, every presidency operates inside a foreign-policy and legal-authority environment that shapes the window of policy action. This report composites five canonical datasets covering legal authority (Solicitor General win rate at SCOTUS), global instability (Geopolitical Risk index, armed conflicts, coups), and strategic baseline (global military expenditure) across every US presidential term since 1923.

Live tiles above show the current administration’s readings to date. The tables below show the full history. All five series are refreshed nightly from political_data.db.

The Solicitor General represents the United States before the Supreme Court. Their win rate — share of merits cases where SCOTUS ruled for the US — is the cleanest single-number read on how well the sitting administration’s legal theory is aligned with the sitting Court. Historically this hovers in the 60-70% range; drops below 50% signal strong ideological misalignment between the White House and the bench.

Shown: 23 administrations with Spaeth-coded SCDB data. Pre-1923 terms excluded; many pre-modern terms await manual entry from academic sources.

UCDP (Uppsala Conflict Data Program) records state-based armed conflicts with at least 25 battle deaths per year. ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data) tracks political violence events at much finer granularity (strikes, protests, riots, battles) across 100+ countries. Together they bound the global-instability envelope a president inherits.

Shown: 23 terms with conflict data. UCDP covers 1946+; ACLED coverage expands from 1997 and is still broadening globally.

The GPR index quantifies geopolitical risk by counting mentions of war, military conflict, and terrorism in 10 major-newspaper archives since 1900. It is the standard quantitative proxy used in Fed research, central-banking papers, and the IMF’s WEO. Baseline ≈ 1.0 across the full sample; term averages diverge widely by crisis era.

Shown: 29 terms. Higher = more geopolitical risk. Caldara-Iacoviello index covers 44 countries, calibrated on news-text frequency of war / conflict / terrorism terms.

Top 5 risk hotspots for the current term:

The Powell-Thyne coup dataset catalogs every irregular leadership-change event globally since 1950 — successful coups (regime change achieved) and attempts (blocked). Dense cluster years historically correspond to post-colonial transitions, Cold War proxy periods, and Arab Spring windows. The measure says nothing about US involvement — it’s the global baseline rate during each term.

Shown: 22 terms. Powell-Thyne dataset covers 1950-present.

SIPRI tracks every national-level military budget globally since 1949. Averaging across the whole dataset gives the planetary milex baseline during each US presidential term. Rising across the past four terms. Top-spender identity has flipped from USSR → USA → PRC over the full sample.

Shown: 22 terms. SIPRI data in constant USD, in billions. Note: USA military expenditure is not in the upstream SIPRI series (collector gap); global totals here exclude USA. USA-specific milex lives in the standard presidential_performance DB via FRED A957RC1Q027SBEA.

Snapshot of the current administration’s readings on each of the five tracked series. All values refresh nightly as source databases update.

• SCOTUS Alignment — Martin-Quinn ideology of the court vs each president’s party.
• Full-Term Ranking — all-metric rank of every president since Hoover.
• Have You Been Better Off? — Trump II vs Biden on 24 kitchen-table metrics.
• Back to Presidential Performance library