Committee Jurisdiction and Internet Intellectual Property Protection

This paper examines the impact of increasingly common congressional committee jurisdictional turf wars on policy outcomes. It develops a theoretical model that shows how legislators balance the benefits of expanded committee jurisdiction against preferred policy outcomes, yielding predictions that are different from the traditional committee-dominance theories. The theory predicts that a) senior members, and members who are in safe districts are most likely to challenge another committee’s jurisdiction; b) policy proposals may be initiated off the proposer’s ideal point in order to obtain jurisdiction over an issue; c) in many cases, policy outcomes will be more moderate with jurisdictional fights than they would be without these turf wars. The paper tests the implications of the theory examining proposed Internet intellectual property protection legislation to reform electronic database law in the 106 Congress. JEL Classification: D7, K2, O3 Thanks to Steve Ansolabehere, Rui de Figueiredo, Tom Gilligan, Shane Greenstein, David King, Mark Ramseyer, Romain Wacziarg, Ezra Zuckerman, and seminar participants at MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley for helpful comments and discussions. I would also like to thank the many people at companies, universities, and associations who permitted to be interviewed for this paper. Daniel Braga provided excellent research assistance. I also wish to acknowledge the generous financial assistance of the E-Business Center at MIT.