“…This paper contributes to the literature on bargaining and gridlock. Within this literature, many causes of gridlock have been proposed; these include polarization (Romer and Rosenthal, 1978;Krehbiel, 1996), divided government (Binder, 2003), reputation concerns (McCarty, 1997;Abreu and Gul, 2000;Groseclose and Mc-Carty, 2001;Cameron and McCarty, 2004;Patty, 2016), policy-search frictions (Callander, 2011;Acharya and Ortner, 2018), dynamic-bargaining concerns with an endogenous status-quo (Dziuda and Loeper, 2016;Austin-Smith, Dziuda, Harstad and Loeper, 2019), and supermajority institutions (Brady and Volden, 1998). Our paper highlights a new cause of gridlock that stems from policy bundling in dynamic environments; this effect runs contrary to the prevailing wisdom that policy bundling reduces gridlock by facilitating compromise (Krutz, 2000(Krutz, , 2001Sinclair, 1997).…”