9309825 Romer For nearly two decades, scholars have worked to explain the pattern of campaign contributions by political action committees (PACs) in U.S. congressional elections. Earlier studies in this field tended to focus on the effects of candidates' party affiliations, incumbency status, and competitiveness on the allocation of PAC contributions. More recent studies have gone on to study the relative importance of more detailed characteristics of congressmen, especially their committee and subcommittee assignments, party and committee leadership positions, seniority, and roll-call voting records. A primary goal of the latter group of studies has been to determine the extent to which various PACs contribute disproportionately to members and chairmen of the committees and subcommittees whose policy jurisdictions are of most concern to the PACs. Overall, the findings regarding PAC-committee relationships are mixed. One likely reason for these mixed results is the inherent difficulty in guessing which PACs should be attracted to which committees. In studies to date, the researcher postulates a priori the committes that are "relevant" to a particular PAC or set of PACs. In most cases, however, the choices are not so obvious, and the researcher is forced to make subjective judgments. In this research investigation, the researchers avoid making specific assumptions about which committees are relevant to different PACs or types of PACs, by taking a dynamic view of the problem. They examine the effects of changes in representative's committee and leadership assignments on changes in the pattern of PAC contributions received by the representative. The underlying assumption is that if PACs tend to favor certain committees, then a representative who switches committees, or who moves into a leadership position on a committee, will tend to see more changes in the pattern of his contributions than a representative who does not change committee positions. A further advantage of the dynamic approach is that the researchers can distinguish between "adding" and "dropping" PACs. If it is important for PACs to develop and maintain long-term relationships with representatives to achieve their goals, then there may be a tendency for PACs not to "abandon" representatives to whom they have contributed in the past, even representatives who move off the committees that the PACs consider to be most relevant. The research investigation covers campaign contributions to races for seats to the U.S. House of Representatives, for the election cycles of 1979/80 through 1987/88. ***
