From Kindle location 5233 of David Friedman’s mind-expanding and surprisingly fun new book Legal Systems Very Different from Ours:
Distinguishing good law from bad is not easy. Individual voters, knowing that their vote has little effect on political outcomes, devote little effort to gathering the information needed to vote wisely. Politicians rarely help out by labeling themselves as bad guys or their bills as bad law. The result, as I have argued elsewhere, is a system that frequently produces bad law, a theoretical conclusion for which I find a great deal of empirical support.
Inertia Wins! 