In contrast, female professors saw expanding the right to vote, reducing hunger, addressing toxic waste and improving air quality as more important problems than men, but viewed all four as less successful than male professors. Similarly, liberal professors said that voting rights, health care of low- income Americans and workplace discrimination were more important problems than their conservative peers, while conservatives rated trade and immigration as more important problems than liberals. Interestingly, conservatives were also more likely than liberals to say that the federal government has been more successful protecting food and drinking water, improving workplace safety, protecting the wilderness, reducing hunger and improving air quality, in large part because they think the federal government has gone far enough on those endeavors. Despite these disagreements, the ratings clearly put the lie to the conventional wisdom that the federal government creates more problems than its solves. To the contrary, the ratings suggest that the federal government is fully capable of tackling important and difficult problems - and succeeding.
Achievement involves more than just success.
After all, government is more likely to succeed if it picks easy, trivial problems to solve. On the notion that government should get extra credit for tackling tough, important problems, we calculated its greatest achievements by adding six parts success to three parts importance and one part difficulty. Using this scoring method, rebuilding Europe, expanding the right to vote, promoting equal access to public accommodations, reducing disease and reducing workplace discrimination emerged as the federal government's greatest achievements of the past half- century. These top five ratings did not vary, regardless of the political ideology, gender or academic discipline of the professor involved. The list of government's top achievements shows the impact of bipartisanship.