Veto power and ranked choice voting

George Tsebelis on the connection between electoral structure and government structure:

> The basic idea is that the more veto players you have, the more difficult it is to change the status quo. And the more ideological distance the veto players have from each other, the more difficult it is to change the status quo…

> In the United States, if this kind of sharp division and polarization that we are seeing now is one we’d want to try to resolve institutionally, then the major solution would be a change in the electoral system, and a transformation to Single Transferable Vote, which means that every voter would rank the different candidates…

>What STV does is, even if you are an extremist of one side or the other, your second vote will go to the more moderate candidate on one side. You’ll have a house or senate where moderates prevail.