Institutional veto points make blocking majority-supported change cheaper than passing it.

Evidence

Now consider cases where a policy opposed by the majority was already in place and the government did not take action to remove it, again going against majority will. Here there might be simpler reasons for why nothing was done, since many political institutions make blocking policy change easier than enacting it. — Mikael Persson and Anders Sundell, Blocking the Poor, 32

Categorization

• XREF: Speaks to veto-player theory and US bicameralism/committee gatekeeping — connects to work on why status quo bias is built into Madisonian design.
• DEEPTHINKING: Suggests the famous ‘policy follows the rich’ finding may be an artifact of institutional friction rather than elite capture — a deflationary reading of a flagship empirical result.