ABSTRACT

The congressional debate over campaign reform underwent two significant changes in the mid-1990s: Republican victories in the 1994 mid-term elections changed its politics, and freewheeling fund-raising in the Democrats 1996 presidential campaign altered its content. Republicans in the House of Representatives, the center of their party's 1994 revolution, turned out to be deeply split on campaign reform. The familiar reform groups, Common Cause and Public Citizen, continued to be active, but a profusion of task forces, forums, and working groups sprang up to bring academics, journalists, and activists together to seek agreement on new combinations of reform ideas. Political action committees were the primary target of mostly Democratic congressional reformers from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. The focus was in accord with public opinion: PACs are the very embodiment of special-interest giving, so throughout the 1980s and 1990s, large popular majorities supported measures that would restrict the committees.