A handful of scholars have devoted attention in recent years to the dynamics of standing committee jurisdictions in the U.S. Congress. This is an important focus because congressional rules and procedures give committees a central role in the legislative process and because the increasingly complex policy environment of recent decades has made clear demarcations of subject matter jurisdiction more difficult. How Congress resolves overlapping committee jurisdictions can affect both the deliberative quality and the substantive outcomes of policymaking. This is an important point of departure for reading John Baughman's new book.

Baughman opens by describing academic and journalistic accounts of the contentious nature of jurisdictional politics among congressional committees. He questions this conventional wisdom, noting that reliance on the “war stories” that reporters and staffers tell is likely to skew our evidence of committee interaction toward the more confrontational episodes. This bias is also evident in academic work: The most sustained scholarly treatment to date on the evolution of committee jurisdictions, David C. King's Turf Wars (1997), casts its light on committees (like House Commerce) that aggressively use the rules to add new issues to their own jurisdictions. Such behavior often precipitates conflict with other committees that have a claim to the same turf, but it represents only one slice of a wider range of committee interaction. If cooperative relations characterize any substantial share of jurisdictional negotiations between committees, then our theories of intercommittee politics need to be broadened to account for cooperation.

From this point of departure, Baughman develops a theory of the conditions under which committees will engage in cooperation or conflict over jurisdiction and connects his theory to the three extant models of legislative organization. He bases his theory in transaction cost economics, which contributes the key insight that cooperative bargains are more likely to occur between committees that have a history of interaction with each other and that have high prospects for continued interaction. This is the most common pattern of intercommittee politics, in which committees exchange influence over pieces of legislation in a manner consistent with the distributive (logrolling) model of legislative organization. Turf wars are most likely when new and unfamiliar issues arise involving committees that have little history of interaction. Turf wars are won by effectively staking claims to policy expertise in a manner consistent with the informational model. When the issue involved is on the majority party agenda, the Speaker and other party leaders intervene in the outcome, consistent with the partisan model.

There is an institutional and historical component to the story as well. Faced with an increasingly complex policy environment, the House in 1974 introduced the practice of multiple referral. Before this reform, the “weight of the bill” was the only applicable rule for referring complex legislation; committee interaction was infrequent. With multiple referral, the points of contact between House committees multiplied, and thus intercommittee bargaining became more common. By giving more discretion to the Speaker, the multiple referral rule, along with other reforms, also gave the majority party leadership more leverage for shaping and guiding legislation.

Baughman does an excellent job employing historical data, case studies, and interviews with committee staff in developing the theory in Chapters 1–3. Case studies and interviews are also crucial sources of evidence for the book's exploration of the parameters of committee cooperation and bargaining in Chapters 4–7, which also see the derivation of hypotheses and reporting of statistical tests. Baughman bases several statistical tests on member preferences and legislative outcomes for some strategically selected bills from recent Congresses and on data drawn from joint referrals and waiver letters in the 105th Congress.

In chapter 4, the data on joint referrals and waivers provide the basis for what should be the critical test of the transaction cost theory. Waiver letters are instances of cooperation on multiple referred bills, in which one committee indicates it will not act on a given bill in deference to another committee's work but retains jurisdiction over the underlying issue. Baughman uses a Poisson regression model to estimate the number of waivers between committee pairs as a function of the number of each pair's jointly referred bills that were acted upon and of the jurisdictional proximity between the two committees. Consistent with the transaction cost theory, the number of waivers increases with greater jurisdictional proximity, a measure derived from multidimensional scaling (MDS) of the number of joint referrals between committee pairs. This reader wonders, however, if the MDS measure is sufficiently removed from the underlying pairwise data, that we have not simply found that the number of waivers increases with the number of joint referrals—something one should expect by chance. One would like to have seen the likelihood of committee waivers modeled, rather than simply the number of waivers, inasmuch as the central insight of the transaction cost theory is that committees are more likely to cooperate with greater past experience and future prospect of interaction.

The remaining chapters examine the use of committees as building blocks for floor coalitions outside of the joint-referral scenario, the impact of overlapping memberships and staff contacts on intercommittee cooperation, and the manner in which the Speaker can use multiple referrals, task forces, and other means to overcome jurisdictional problems. Chapter 6 reveals the most important finding for advancing the transaction cost theory. The number of shared members in a given pair of committees, particularly by committee or subcommittee chairs, has a positive relationship with the number of waivers granted in the pair when controlling for the other variables in the Poisson regression from Chapter 4.

Common Ground is a convincing presentation of a new theory of legislative committee jurisdiction, one that can account for a greater range of behavior than previous theories and that extends our understanding of the conditional nature of the three predominant models of legislative organization. It effectively deploys abstract theorizing, statistical analysis, interview reports, and case studies and brings to bear insights from outside the congressional studies literature. It deserves careful attention from all congressional scholars.