To start, we should keep in mind that the Reagan presidency is skating along the line separating a journalistic subject from a historical one. We're not in a place yet to write a systematic and objective history. The clearest indication of this is the status of the Foreign Relations of the United States (this is the primary way the government releases declassified documents) volumes for Reagan -- only 4 of 52 have been released. Similarly, compare the status of the materials at the Reagan Library (mostly closed) to those at, say, the Kennedy Library (essentially all open). Without the archives, you can't really do history and so the leading writings on Reagan are still using journalistic rather than historical research methods. Interpretations may change fundamentally once we start doing history. Most of the controversies surrounding Reagan are still quite "live" today which only compounds the difficulty.

Gil Troy's 2008 historiographical essay on Reagan begins from the premise that historians have done "a lousy job" of writing about Reagan. He emphasizes the shift from the earliest writings on Reagan that portrayed him as an "amiable dunce" towards a more positive assessment colored by the Clinton Era (the emergence of the "new Democrats" who largely accepted Reagan era changes), the difficulties of publicly criticizing someone who was publicly suffering from a dreadful disease, and the natural tendency to celebrate the dead. Troy also argues that the papers that have been released cast Reagan as exerting a more important role in his own White House than the earlier stereotypes, which leads to a more positive judgment.

I think your question asks more about specific policy areas, which is a bit harder to cover (but see Millar on the Historiography of the Reagan era -- it's a masters thesis but also pretty good). On the economic side, though, it's worth nothing that the 1980s did witness a substantial economic boom -- you can argue that happened either because of or in spite of Reagan, but the fact is that it weights in Reagan's favor. On the foreign policy side, Reagan has gotten a lot of credit for his diplomacy with Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War. Here, I would argue that we're on the least solid ground in forming a real assessment, but the present biographical works tend to credit Reagan. If this is true, then ending the Cold War successfully and peacefully is a tremendous accomplishment.

This takes us to the surveys you reference at the outset. I think these need to be interpreted with a tremendous grain of salt -- there's a difference between a historical consensus or historical view (i.e., a shared, evidence-based view developed through scholarly conversation) and historians' personal views. The surveys you're talking about identify some large body of experts -- hundreds of political scientists or historians -- who work in the general field and ask them to rank many or all presidents. Only a very small proportion of those people are Reagan scholars or specialists in the relevant period. These surveys are really eliciting something along the lines of the gut reaction of well-informed people, not a studied historical judgement.

Perhaps the present political winds are blowing against Reagan. I won't presume to say, but much more importantly, the next 10-15 years will be the period in which we can work on Reagan much more seriously. The documents will be released, and I think we will start to develop a much firmer understanding. Until then, the record on Reagan remains provisional.

TL;DR: It's too early to say.

Ah. Well. From the graveyard of removed comments I think we can surmise that even a good 31 years after the end of Reagan's presidency, and more than 16 years after his death, his Presidency produces feelings, both strongly positive and negative.

Anyway, if we dive into the results linked to on the Wkipedia page, we can tease out some possible answers to your question. First, we're discounting the popular surveys - the fact that JFK, Bill Clinton and Reagan tend to rank the highest in those surveys makes me believe that a lot of the polled Americans associate nostalgia with Presidential administrations, and that's a whole different field to cover.

So focusing on the scholar surveys and the scores as linked, first we should note one very curious thing - of the sixteen total sources listed, the first five very solidly place Reagan in the middling range, mostly being in the third quartile. It's only around 2000 that Reagan marches up to the top ranks. So for a good decade or so after Reagan's presidency, his legacy was considered by historians to be extremely ambivalent.

Now, to focus on the 21st century sources, I'm very much drawn to the Sierra College Research Institute and C-SPAN in particular, because unlike the others, which seem to be mostly asking historians "give this president a score, and we'll tally all the figures up", these two surveys both were conducted a number of times, and breakdown the scores for each president into sub-categories, so we are able to see in which areas historians think a President's administration was good, middling and poor.

The most recent Sierra College data is here, for those who are interested, and the most recent C-SPAN data is here.

Now we see some further curious things. Starting with the C-SPAN data, Reagan's highest scores are "Public Persuasion" (90.9), "Vision/Setting an Agenda" (84.9), and "International Relations" (76.8). His three lowest scores are "Pursued Equal Justice for All" (44.6), "Administrative Skills" (47.4), and "Economic Management" (60.9 - this actually puts him 16th and in between John Adams and John Quincy Adams). So interestingly, even though this survey overall ranks Reagan as 9th, it's with his administration itself being considered not well run, being very unequal in its domestic impacts, and having OK-but-not-amazing economic returns.

Now let's look at Sierra College (Reagan score: 13th), which has a frankly dizzying data set with overall scores, overall sub-scores in "Attributes", "Abilities" and "Accomplishments", and then sub-sub-scores within those fields. Now we are really drilling down into data. All his scores are relatively high (nothing in Buchanan or Andrew Johnson territory), but some are middling. His lowest scores are "Intelligence" (31), "Background" (27), "Integrity" (24), and "Executive Appointments" (20). In the middle are "Court Appointments" (18), "Handling of US Economy" (18), and "Domestic Accomplishments" (16), and his highest scores are "Leadership Ability" (7), "Relationship with Congress" (6), "Party Leadership" (4), and most notably "Luck"(3).

Honestly the Sierra College rankings feel almost like damning Reagan with faint praise. He comes off as relatively unimaginative, and with an OK-but-not-great domestic record, but outstanding scores on vision, communication and above all luck.

I think there's something to this. There is a lot to be said for Reagan being "the Great Communicator", who more or less realigned US politics with his election, and steered the Republican Party towards a form of ideological conservatism (beating out the party's older, more moderate and Northeastern wing, best personified by George H.W. Bush), and on top of that was able to win away "Reagan Democrats" in his two election victories, although it's worth noting that this didn't necessarily translate into Republican victories further down the slate: the House of Representatives kept its Democratic majority from 1955 to 1995, despite Reagan's electoral success, and despite his 1980 victory helping to flip the Senate to a Republican majority in 1981 (for the first time since 1955), it reverted to a Democratic majority in 1987. Reagan did have a knack for boiling complicated ideas down into simple phrases that he could deliver with aplomb, in no small part because of his acting background ("There you go again", "Trust But Verify", "A Recession is when your neighbor loses a job, a depression is when you lose your job, and recovery is when President Carter loses his").

But I want to focus a bit on that highest score in particular: in a lot of ways, Reagan was a lucky president. Deregulation was started in the 1970s, and busting inflation was initiated by Fed Chairman Paul Volcker in 1979, but the actual economic benefits accrued under Reagan's presidency. Even anti-inflationary policies (in part spurred by the Fed trying to raise interest rates to fight the danger of inflation caused in no small part by Reagan's deficit spending) caused a severe and long-lasting downturn from July 1981 to November 1982 that saw unemployment rise to its highest levels since the Great Depression, and Reagan's approval ratings sink. It's by some luck, however, that this cleared up and the economy began growing before the 1984 elections (in reverse, George H.W. Bush had the highest approval ratings ever in 1991, but the following recession in 1992 destroyed those ratings and helped in his electoral defeat that year). Reagan was also lucky that his aggressive stance towards the Soviet Union in 1981-1983 didn't unintentionally ignite World War III, especially during the 1983 Able Archer exercises that the Soviet leadership feared was a cover for an actual first strike. He's lucky that his Soviet counterpart from 1985 on was Mikhail Gorbachev, who was genuinely interested in de-escalation of Cold War tensions, and built a successful diplomatic relationship with Reagan - and also unilaterally did much of the work, despite what myths of "Reagan winning the Cold War" or "Reagan defeating Communism" might say. He's lucky that the Iran-Contra Affair wasn't presidency-ending, which it could have been (I suspect the low marks for "Integrity", "Intelligence" and "Administrative Skills" come in here...the best that could be argued in Reagan's defense during the scandal is that he had no idea what multiple people in his administration were doing in terms of violating the law), and that it occurred relatively late in his administration. He was lucky that the biggest daily stock market crash in US history ("Black Monday"), didn't have knock-on effects in the "real" economy, and that the Savings and Loan crisis that did impact the US economy negatively didn't really have knock-on effects until after Reagan left office.

Maybe there's a bigger lesson here - a lot of presidents tend to be lucky, or unlucky, as there are many, many contingencies that occur during their time in office that they may or may not actually be responsible for. But it happens on their watch, so they tend to either get the credit - or the blame.

More of course can be said on this topic, but /u/gent2012 has written previously on controversy over how the Reagan presidency is viewed, so this previous answer may be of interest for yout.

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Also, it's not about Reagan specifically, but there's a previous answer by /u/BroseppeVerdi which analyses these Presidential rankings and how they usually work more generally, which might be good context here.