It depends on the country though. France is effectively first-past-the-post. Technically (rarely in practice) you can even get 3-4 candidates in the second round if the turnout is very high.
Two-round is not fundamentally a huge improvement and de facto is what US has with party primaries (of course unlike in France third parties can't really survive in such a system).
Arguably of course having a three way stalemate might be occasionally preferable than 1 party having near absolute control because of controlling 50%+1 seats.
Thankfully US has all sorts of checks and balances and it might take a while for a single party to get control of the House, Senate, White House and the Supreme court (for instance in the UK where there are basically no checks an balances and the parliament has absolute power if a pseudo-Fascist party somehow managed to win they could more or less do anything they wanted and they'd only need 30-40% of all votes for that).
IMHO electoral systems matter but extreme polarization is the real problem. Back in the 70s even a Republican president like Nixon could somewhat effectively work with the Democrat controlled congress. Yet now a split congress can't even pass legislation that technically both parties support (e.g. the border billy)
It depends on the country though. France is effectively first-past-the-post. Technically (rarely in practice) you can even get 3-4 candidates in the second round if the turnout is very high.
Two-round is not fundamentally a huge improvement and de facto is what US has with party primaries (of course unlike in France third parties can't really survive in such a system).
Arguably of course having a three way stalemate might be occasionally preferable than 1 party having near absolute control because of controlling 50%+1 seats.
Thankfully US has all sorts of checks and balances and it might take a while for a single party to get control of the House, Senate, White House and the Supreme court (for instance in the UK where there are basically no checks an balances and the parliament has absolute power if a pseudo-Fascist party somehow managed to win they could more or less do anything they wanted and they'd only need 30-40% of all votes for that).
IMHO electoral systems matter but extreme polarization is the real problem. Back in the 70s even a Republican president like Nixon could somewhat effectively work with the Democrat controlled congress. Yet now a split congress can't even pass legislation that technically both parties support (e.g. the border billy)