Political Interest Groups

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U. S. Political Parties and Interest Groups
Final Exam
Fall-2014

1) In What ways campaign finance reform weakened the political parties?

The Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform act has weakened political parties by limiting fundraising and spending from national parties. In addition, only allowing federal funds to be used for campaigning, and limiting fundraising and nonfederal candidates and officeholders on behalf of party committees, other candidates, and nonprofit organizations.
In terms of limiting fundraising for national parties on November 6, 2002, national party committees are not able to solicit, receive, or direct to another person or spend nonfederal funds. This has hurt both parties dearly since there neither candidate can get …show more content…

Political parties accomplish their goals through campaign finance committees that raise money and donate it so that the candidates representing their party would win elections. Interest groups do not need campaign finance committees since the campaign finance committee serves as a way to purposely limit committees in to be involved in the election process. By purposely being limited from participation, campaign finance committees do not give away their bias if any exist for the part they are campaigning for. Interest groups do not need this cover up since it is already understood that they want their main person elected. The political party’s purpose is to win elections whereas the interest group’s purpose is to influence those policy makers to making policies that favor them. The political party’s internal politics can have disagreement among certain issues without compromising their values. For examples, some young Republicans may not care whether there is same sex marriage whereas the older Republicans might care about this issue very much and disagreement occurs internally within the party, but this does not compromise its identity. This is not the case for interest groups however since interest groups form from some issue like the National Rifle Arms interest groups forms because of the issue of being able to …show more content…

For example, Barack Obama’s Democratic Party had appeal to the poor and the minorities which happen to make up a large number of what we know to be the USA today. President Obama advocated Universal Health Care for all. Obama also voted for abortion to be legal. These are all decisions that favor minority groups such as poor people and women. In addition, the candidate of interest has to appeal to both prospective and retrospective voters with the issues of the economy: this candidate would do this by generating a very positive hopeful speech about the economy to appeal to the prospective voter, but also would have to have some sort of track record that would indicate that the candidate is good with managing money in order to appeal to the retrospective voter. Another thing to keep in mind is that the economic issues that people are paying much attention to are those relating to social welfare programs and taxes in general. Obviously the candidate who would promise the majority of the public what they want (increase social welfare program funding) and decreased taxes for the majority of the people in the country would appeal to prospective as well as retrospective voters. It is not necessary to appeal much to the retrospective voter since this is not the voter that represents the majority in first time elections for

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