Revision & Exam Practice for the “legacy” A Level qualifications including:

• Edexcel (Unit 3C – Representative Processes in the USA, Unit 4C – Governing the USA)
• AQA (Unit 3A – The Politics of the USA, Unit 4A – The Government of the USA)
• OCR (F855 – US Government & Politics)

How to use these questions for revision and exam practice:

1. For short-answer questions, write a 3 paragraph response using the PEEACH paragraph structure (P=point, E=evidence, E=explain, A=argument, C=counter argument, H=how does this answer the question?)
2. Once you have completed your question, read the indicative content and the mark scheme.
3. Complete the “Make It Better” (MIB) Task:
   1. Highlight the parts of the indicative content your were able to fully explain and exemplify in green.
   2. Highlight the parts of the indicative content you partially explained and/or exemplified in yellow.
   3. Highlight the parts of the indicative content which you did not include in red.
4. Using the mark scheme, award yourself a level and a mark – compare this to your target grade – are you on track to achieve this in the examination?
5. There is also a space for you to add additional notes and/or examples that don’t appear in the indicative content, or add better explanations, or include additional, points from the indicative content.

Why has campaign finance reform had such limited success? (15)

Indicative Content

The reasons campaign finance reform has had such limited success include:

• candidates want to spend as much as possible to gain an advantage over their opposition, and are constantly exploiting the loopholes and pushing the boundaries of legislation, e.g. the delay by Jeb Bush in 2015 in announcing his presidential run so that he could continue raising money for his super PAC. see e.g. http://tinyurl.com/kybawgk
• the presidential election financing system in both primaries and general election has collapsed because candidates can raise more money outside the system and both Obama and Romney self-financed in 2012
• donors want to donate; there is apparently a widespread belief that donations buy influence, and the bigger the donation, the bigger the influence
• the role of the Supreme Court and the strength of constitutional rights to free speech: Buckley made all limits on candidate expenditure (except where federally subsidised) unconstitutional in the 1970s and more recently Citizens United made the electoral activities of independent groups exempt from regulation and has led to the growth of ‘super PACs’
• the difficulty of enforcing regulation, e.g. candidates are not officially allowed to coordinate their campaigns with super PACs which are supporting them but coordination is hard to prove, and problems of enforcement are compounded by the ineffectualness of the FEC, whose six members are perpetually gridlocked at 3-3, see e.g. http://tinyurl.com/nkq5m6o
• lack of political will – congressional incumbents have almost always benefited from outspending their opponents and consequently have little incentive to introduce limitations on that spending