Playing with the Social Contract: Tools for Measuring, Testing and Debating Resilience in Europe
By Emre Erdogan & Pinar Uyan-Semerci
Overlapping crises test more than governments’ capacity to respond. They test the trust, rights and solidarity that hold societies together. The CO3 Civic Playground makes those pressures visible through three interactive research prototypes that enable users to experience political trade-offs, test assumptions against comparative evidence and examine how the social contract is measured across the European Union.
The social contract is one of political theory’s oldest concepts, but its contemporary significance lies in the everyday expectations that connect citizens, institutions and societies. These expectations extend beyond formal rights and obligations to questions of legitimacy, fairness, solidarity and mutual responsibility. Today, they face simultaneous pressure from pandemics, energy and cost-of-living shocks, war on Europe’s borders and pervasive information disorders. Measures that manage an immediate crisis may therefore carry longer-term costs for trust, rights or social cohesion.
The Horizon Europe project CO3 -Continuous Construction of Resilient Social Contracts- treats the social contract not as a settlement reached once, but as an arrangement continuously reconstructed through interactions among citizens, institutions and societal actors. Three games have different functions: The Civic Playground translates this perspective into a three-stage journey. Archipelago allows users to experience political trade-offs; Social Contract Explorer tests their assumptions against comparative evidence; and Social Contract Indicators invites them to examine critically how those comparisons are constructed and measured.
The tools support four communities with different needs. Policymakers can rehearse crisis decisions at low cost and identify dimensions on which European societies may be vulnerable. Researchers can scrutinise a six-domain operationalisation of the social contract.
Educators can build learning activities around decisions, evidence and methodological reflection. Journalists can test prevailing narratives against comparative evidence while receiving guidance on how to interpret that evidence without overstating it.
Why use interactive tools?
Reading about democratic resilience is one thing; making decisions under pressure is another. The CO3 Civic Playground invites users to take an active role: to make difficult choices, predict how countries compare and question what the evidence actually measures. Its three tools turn abstract debates about the social contract into experiences that can be discussed, challenged and revisited.
For policymakers, Archipelago offers a safe setting in which to discuss the costs of crisis decisions, while the comparative tools help identify assumptions worth checking before drawing policy conclusions. For educators, the activities can open classroom discussions about rights, trust, solidarity and fairness. Researchers can use the Explorer and Indicators dashboard to examine how comparisons change with the choice of indicators and the way they are measured.
Journalists can use the tools to question familiar narratives about European countries and trace comparative claims back to their underlying evidence. These are intended uses, not proven impacts: research on gamification suggests that interactive learning can be beneficial, but outcomes depend on design and context (Sailer & Homner, 2020). Whether the CO3 tools improve knowledge or civic competencies remains to be evaluated.
Archipelago: rehearsing the trade-offs of crisis governance
Can governments strengthen security without undermining rights? What does a measure that contains today's crisis cost tomorrow's legitimacy? Questions of this kind are central to debates on democratic resilience, yet they are rarely encountered other than in the abstract.
Archipelago is an interactive simulation game developed as part of the CO3 Civic Playground. Players take responsibility for governing a fictional island and navigate six successive crises, making decisions that affect five interconnected dimensions of the social contract: rights, legitimacy, cohesion, justice and resilience. Each decision involves competing priorities, requiring players to consider how addressing one problem may create new challenges elsewhere.
By experiencing the consequences of their choices, players explore how social contracts are continuously negotiated and reconstructed, particularly during crises. Rather than offering a single correct solution, Archipelago encourages reflection on the political and normative trade-offs involved in governing democratic societies.
This design lends itself to several uses. In policy settings, the game can serve as a tabletop exercise in which a team plays a common scenario and then reflects on which values it was prepared to sacrifice first, thereby rendering implicit priorities explicit before real decisions are taken. In teaching and research, it offers an experiential entry point to competing theories of justice: the debrief can contrast choices guided by a Rawlsian concern for the least advantaged (Rawls, 1971) with those following utilitarian or libertarian reasoning. For journalists, it provides an understanding from within of why crisis governance so seldom offers options that benefit every group and objective at once.
Social Contract Explorer: testing assumptions against comparative evidence
Are the countries commonly regarded as stable necessarily those with the strongest social contracts? Do institutional trust, social cohesion and perceived fairness move together across national contexts? Social Contract Explorer addresses such questions through an evidence-led data game covering the EU27. Its logic departs from that of a conventional dashboard: rather than presenting data first, it asks users to commit to an expectation and then confronts that expectation with Eurobarometer-based indicators. The discrepancy between expectation and evidence constitutes the learning moment.
What the Explorer brings into view is the multidimensionality of the concept. Familiar mental maps of Europe — including assumptions about trust in Northern Europe or fragility elsewhere — may not hold across every indicator, and a country's relative position on one dimension does not predict its position on others. A society may, for example, report strong horizontal bonds among citizens alongside deep distrust of its institutions, a configuration whose implications differ markedly from a generalised collapse of trust. Such mismatches offer journalists promising leads and a means of checking comparative claims before publication; they invite policymakers to examine assumptions about their own country that often mirror those of public debate; and they give educators concrete material for teaching conceptualisation, cross-national comparison and the interpretation of survey data.
The Explorer organises indicators in a Domain → Subdomain → Indicator hierarchy, allowing users to trace each score to its underlying survey items. Its min–max normalisation places observations within the range of countries being compared; it does not measure performance against an absolute standard. A score near zero therefore indicates a position near the lower end of the comparison range, subject to the direction and coverage of the measure, rather than the absence of a social contract. Because the scoring direction of some indicators remains under expert review, country rankings require particular caution. Responsible reporting must preserve these distinctions rather than convert relative scores into claims about Europe’s "worst" country.
Social Contract Indicators: the measurement behind the tools
The study of social contracts raises a fundamental methodological question: how can a multidimensional and historically evolving concept be operationalised through observable indicators?
Social Contract Indicators offers one answer for the EU27. The dashboard brings together a six-domain conceptual framework, underlying indicators and data sources. It provides a measurement-oriented complement to the games, although the extent to which the applications share an identical dataset or scoring engine should not be assumed. The framework distinguishes six domains, illustrated below with examples of the kinds of questions each raises (rather than a list of specific dashboard indicators):
Domain | What it captures (illustrative examples) |
Citizenship rights | Rights citizens hold and how they perceive them—for example, whether individuals believe their freedoms and opportunities to participate are protected. |
Citizen–state relations | How citizens relate to and engage with state institutions—for example, voting, participating in public affairs or contacting public authorities. |
Legitimacy | Whether institutions are regarded as rightful and trustworthy—for example, confidence in parliament or other public institutions. |
Social cohesion | Horizontal bonds and solidarity among citizens—for example, interpersonal trust and willingness to support others in times of difficulty. |
Justice and fairness | Perceptions of equal treatment and fair distribution—for example, whether people believe opportunities and public resources are distributed fairly. |
Crisis resilience | The capacity to withstand and adapt to shocks—for example, how societies respond to economic disruption, public-health emergencies or other crises. |
Social Contract Indicators complements the two games by exposing the measurement choices behind comparative claims.
Researchers can examine how each domain is operationalised, which indicators support it and how alternative choices might change the resulting picture; the framework is documented in the co-authored manuscript Operationalizing the Social Contract, and critique and reuse are explicitly welcomed.
Policymakers can use the dashboard to identify dimensions for further investigation, but not as a validated diagnostic or monitoring instrument.
Journalists can consult its indicator descriptions and source information when checking comparative claims before publication.
Indicators are, by necessity, partial representations of broader concepts, and cross-national comparison demands attention to validity, measurement consistency and context. The dashboard is designed to make these questions visible rather than to conceal them behind a single composite score.
From playing to understanding: an integrated approach
The three tools provide complementary ways to engage with the social contract: experiencing political trade-offs, testing assumptions against comparative evidence, and examining how that evidence is measured. They can be used separately or together, depending on the setting and the questions participants wish to explore.
Putting the Civic Playground into practice
For policymakers, Archipelago can support participatory workshops in which teams confront competing priorities during crises and discuss the implications of alternative responses. The exercise is intended to make underlying values and disagreements visible, rather than predict real-world policy outcomes.
For educators, combining Archipelago with Social Contract Explorer can connect debates about rights, legitimacy and solidarity to decisions and comparative data. In a classroom, students can compare their initial expectations with survey-based evidence and reflect on why their assumptions did or did not hold.
For researchers, Social Contract Indicators offers a way to inspect the operationalisation of the social contract, question measurement choices and identify avenues for further inquiry. Journalists and civil society organisations can use Social Contract Explorer to scrutinise familiar claims about European countries, while consulting the Indicators dashboard to check the meaning and limitations of the measures before communicating findings.
The tools need not be used as a fixed sequence. A policy laboratory, classroom exercise, research methods seminar or editorial briefing may focus on one application, while a combined session can move from a normative dilemma to an empirical comparison and then to its measurement assumptions.
For example, a ninety-minute university seminar or policy workshop could begin with participants playing Archipelago in small groups and discussing which dimensions they prioritised under pressure. Participants could then use Social Contract Explorer to test expectations about European countries before turning to Social Contract Indicators to trace a surprising result back to its survey items and discuss alternative operationalisations.
Facilitators should explain that Archipelago’s five tracked dimensions and the dashboard’s six conceptual domains overlap but are not one-to-one equivalents.
These tools are structured starting points for discussion and inquiry, not substitutes for theoretical reading, policy analysis or methodological training. Their educational and practical value depends on how they are used and evaluated.
Status and invitation
All three tools are research prototypes and are presented as such. The data package retains a methodology notice for indicators whose scoring direction may require expert review. The Civic Playground should accordingly be understood as a space for exploring, and contesting, the measurement of the social contract rather than as a definitive verdict on any country.
We invite each community to engage with the Civic Playground in a concrete way. Public institutions can pilot a policy-laboratory session or adapt the scenarios to their own context. Researchers can critique the indicators, propose alternative operationalisations or collaborate on the data. Journalists can request a data briefing before reporting comparative findings. Archipelago, Social Contract Explorer and Social Contract Indicators are available together at co3.civicplayground.org.
References
• Deterding, S., Dixon, D., Khaled, R., & Nacke, L. (2011). From game design elements to gamefulness: Defining "gamification". In Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference (pp. 9–15). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2181037.2181040
Erdogan, E., Uyan Semerci, P., & Erçetin Sabuncu, T. (2025). Reconstructing the Social Contract: A Multi-Domain Framework for Contemporary Democratic Societies. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20490698
• Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Harvard University Press.
• Sailer, M., & Homner, L. (2020). The gamification of learning: A meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 32(1), 77–112. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-019-09498-w
