Does political gridlock undermine checks and balances? A Lab Experiment

Strong checks on the executive are aimed at protecting citizens from the government abuse of power. However, citizens have supported the loosening of these checks in many countries and periods. We present a simple model where citizens may remove the controls on the executive even when this allows rent extraction. Citizens' decision is triggered by a political gridlock, that is, a situation where an executive proposing a reform is blocked by a conservative legislature. We test the main predictions of the model in a lab experiment. We nd that political gridlocks raise the probability that subjects in the experiment choose to weaken checks and balances. This result is partially consistent with the predictions of our model: subjects weaken controls in response to a political gridlock not only when the reform is beneficial, which is the predicted result, but also when it is harmful, which rejects our model prediction. Consistent with the model predictions, we find that the probability that subjects weakencontrols is lower when rents are high. Finally, we compare neutral and political framing - with rents identified as "costs" in the former and "corruption" in the latter-, and find that the probability that subjects choose to weaken checks and balances is lower in the political framing.