In 1971, Congress passed the Federal Election Campaign Act. This act requires federal political candidates to reveal the sources of the money used for their campaigns. This money is called campaign contributions. The act also limits the contributions that a person or group can donate to a single candidate.
Which of the following is most likely the main force behind the passage of this campaign law?
Special interest groups wanted to get credit for their contributions to politicians.
Politicians wanted to show how diverse their contributors were.
Media companies wanted to find more people and interest groups to pay for advertising.
People were concerned about what groups were influencing politicians through their contributions.
Answers
Answer:
FECA was preceded by laws regulating various aspects of federal election campaign finance:
The Tillman Act of 1907 banned corporate contributions in federal elections.
The Publicity Act of 1910, as amended in 1911, required disclosure by campaign committees and limited campaign spending, but the limits were struck down in Newberry v. United States (1921).
The Federal Corrupt Practices Act of 1925 imposed additional disclosure requirements.
Amendments passed in 1940 to the Hatch Act of 1939 limited contributions to candidates and to national party committees and imposed spending limits on party committees.
And in 1947 the Taft-Hartley Act outlawed labor union contributions and purported to restrict corporate and labor spending on federal elections as well. The spending limits were largely ineffective, however, because they applied only to party committee spending and could easily be evaded. The disclosure requirements were often ignored in the absence of any meaningful enforcement mechanism