As the 2024 presidential election approaches, you can almost feel the tension rising in the air. Today on Transition Lab, we talk with Harvard professor Archon Fung about why political discourse today feels so rough, why our democratic institutions feel so fragile and what we might do about it. 

Archon Fung is the director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and the current Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. He’s been at Harvard since 1999 and has authored five books, edited four collections and written dozens of articles for a wide variety of journals and publications.