Unpacking the Social Contract: A Data-Driven Exploration

Written by Emre Erdogan and Pinar Uyan Semerci, professors at Istanbul Bilgi University.

In an era marked by democratic backsliding, rising affective polarization, and citizen disillusionment with political institutions amid polycrisis, the concept of the social contract has powerfully re-entered our public and academic discourse. Historically, classical thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau framed the social contract as a foundational agreement from the state of nature to polity. Today, however, the social contract is increasingly invoked by political theorists, policymakers, and civil society organizations to diagnose exactly what binds, or fails to bind, citizens to their political communities and to one another. Yet, despite this normative centrality, empirical tools for systematically measuring and comparing social contracts across different countries remain underdeveloped.

Existing indices of democratic quality, such as V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) and Freedom House, primarily track formal institutional features, such as electoral integrity, media freedom, and judicial independence. While invaluable for tracking formal democratic performance, these objective measures largely neglect citizen perceptions, particularly consent and legitimacy: How do people actually experience their social contracts? Whether they see themselves as equal partners?

To truly understand the health of a democracy, we must recognize that subjective dimensions, like perceived legitimacy and interpersonal trust, are not mere reflections of objective conditions; they constitute the relational fabric that sustains or erodes democratic polities.

Bridging Theory and Measurement: The Six-Domain Framework

To address this measurement gap, we developed a comprehensive, theory-driven framework that operationalizes the social contract for empirical analysis. Drawing on classical liberal theory, and critical interventions by thinkers like Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, and post-foundational perspectives (CO3 WP2), we disaggregate the social contract into six analytically distinct but interdependent domains:

·      Citizenship Rights, Responsibilities, and Obligations: This domain forms the normative bedrock of the contract, encompassing both codified entitlements, like civil liberties and welfare, and expected civic duties. It also critically evaluates perceptions of inclusivity and who truly “counts” within the polity, addressing historical exclusions.

·      Citizen-State Relations: Moving beyond the material provision of security and public goods, this domain examines the affective bonds, symbolic alignment, and everyday experiential trust between citizens and public institutions.

·      Legitimacy: This domain addresses the conditions under which political authority is recognized as rightful. It requires not just legal conformity, but normative justifiability, procedural fairness, and ongoing public consent.

·      Social Cohesion and Mutual Regard: Shifting from vertical state relations to the horizontal bonds among citizens, this domain measures interpersonal trust, recognition across social divides, and the shared sense of belonging necessary to withstand polarization.

·      Justice and Fairness: At the normative heart of the contract, this domain assesses whether the distribution of resources and opportunities is perceived as fair, highlighting the crucial gap between democratic ideals and lived structural inequalities.

·      Resilience: Treating the social contract as a dynamic, evolving arrangement, this final domain captures a society's capacity to absorb crises, resist authoritarian drift, and reimagine foundational norms through democratic renewal.

Importantly, these six domains are interdependent; erosion in one area, such as perceived injustice, can rapidly cascade into declining social cohesion and fractured institutional legitimacy.

Data, Aggregation, and Doubble Normalization

Turning these big ideas into measurable data takes careful planning. We analyzed over 150 survey questions from the Standard Eurobarometer (collected between 2019 and 2024) to evaluate the social contract across 27 member states of the European Union. We organized this massive amount of data step-by-step: grouping individual survey responses by topic, combining them into our six main domains, and finally aggregating them into a single overall score for each country. However, mixing different types of survey questions (like simple "yes/no" answers versus "1-to-10" scales) creates a mathematical problem. If you average everything together, the final scores tend to clump in the middle, making it hard to see the real differences between countries. To fix this, we used a technique called "double normalization". Simply put, every time we combined scores into a bigger category, we mathematically "stretched" the new scores to fit perfectly onto a standard 0-to-1 scale. This stretching process prevents the data from squishing together, ensuring that the final comparisons between countries remain sharp, accurate, and easy to understand.

The Interactive Dashboard: Social Contract Indicators Data, Aggregation, and Doubble Normalization

Transparency is a core democratic value, which is why we built an interactive, open-access dashboard using Python and Streamlit. Rather than locking findings into static reports, this tool empowers researchers, policymakers, and citizens to explore the data actively. Users can analyze cross-national trends through seven distinct visual perspectives: Tables, Bar Charts, Choropleth Maps, Scatter Plots, Radar Charts, Indicator-level analysis, and a transparent Metadata view. In our commitment to open science, the entire analytical pipeline and dashboard codebase are publicly available on GitHub. Dashboard is accessible through its own website: http://socialcontractindicators.civicexplorer.org:8502/

Empirical Insights

Figure 1. Composite Index by Country

Applying this framework to the EU27 reveals that European social contracts are far from uniform, with composite scores ranging from 0.00 to 1.00 and an EU average of 0.52. The composite index highlights a distinct North-South-East gradient. Top performers include Luxembourg (1.00), Ireland (0.95), and Lithuania (0.91), reflecting strong citizen perceptions across multiple domains. At the lower end, the Czech Republic (0.26), Greece (0.37), and Bulgaria (0.37) exhibit weaker overall scores, suggesting systemic challenges. Yet, the true diagnostic power of the framework lies in looking beyond the aggregate scores. A radar chart comparison between Denmark and Hungary is highly illuminating. Denmark displays robust scores in Legitimacy (1.00) and Citizen-State Relations (0.87). However, its lowest-scoring domain, Fairness (0.10), stands out as a relative weakness, suggesting perceptions of economic equality diverge from its strong institutional performance. Hungary, conversely, exhibits a fragmented profile; while it scores relatively better on Citizen-State Relations (0.70), it shows pronounced deficits in Legitimacy (0.41) and Resilience to Crises (0.20). The data also reveals powerful correlations. Legitimacy and Resilience to Crises are strongly linked (r = 0.82), indicating that countries with higher institutional trust are better equipped to weather political and social shocks. Similarly, Legitimacy and Citizen-State Relations exhibit a strong positive correlation (r = 0.85).

Figure 2. Comparison of Hungary and Denmark on Subdomains

Figure 3. Relationship between Legitimacy and Resilience

However, analyzing outliers provides actionable policy intelligence. For example, Poland shows robust Social Cohesion (0.79) but more moderate Legitimacy (0.60), pointing to strong horizontal solidarity despite lagging institutional trust. Greece, facing a prolonged economic crisis, exhibits comparatively weaker scores across most domains (Legitimacy = 0.45, Composite = 0.37), indicating that both vertical and horizontal dimensions of its social contract have been heavily strained.

Practical Applications of the Dashboard

This tool serves as a public good with tangible applications for diverse stakeholders:

·      For Policymakers: It functions as an early warning system. Declining scores on specific subdomains, such as perceived fairness, signal emerging problems before they manifest in mass protests, enabling targeted interventions.

·      For Journalists and Civil Society: The tool democratizes data access, allowing investigative journalists to compare government claims against citizen perceptions, and helping civil society hold authorities accountable.

·      For Governments: It offers benchmarking capabilities, enabling countries to assess performance relative to peers and to guide strategic priority-setting.

Limitations and The Road Ahead

While robust, our framework has limitations. We are constrained by Eurobarometer's question coverage, meaning vital topics like climate justice receive limited attention. We also assume equal weighting across all domains, though normative arguments could be made that certain areas, like Legitimacy, are more foundational. Furthermore, our indicators capture subjective citizen perceptions, which may occasionally diverge from objective institutional realities.

Looking forward, several exciting extensions are possible. Longitudinal analysis could track how social contracts evolve in response to shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic or the 2022 energy crisis. Geographic expansion using the World Values Survey could test these domains across non-European democracies. Finally, integrating machine learning could reveal latent “social contract regimes”, while micro-level analysis could uncover how age, gender, or ethnicity shape the lived experience of the social contract. The social contract is not a relic of Enlightenment philosophy; it is the living, breathing, and measurable fabric of our contemporary societies. By combining rigorous political theory with advanced data visualization and open-source methodologies, we can move from vague laments about democratic decline to precise, actionable diagnoses. In an era of profound polycrisis, these instruments are essential for understanding, diagnosing, and ultimately strengthening the resilient democracies of the future.