Drivers of change in social contracts: Building a conceptual framework

The role that social contracts play in the stability of countries and the well-being of people has recently re-emerged as a field of research. Social contracts can stabilize the relationship between state and society if they establish sufficient predictability about the mutual deliverables between actors. However, they are more effective in this regard if they change every now and then to take account of changes in the framework conditions, the positions and preferences of the contracting parties, and prevailing norms, values and ideologies. The question is, thus, when, why and how social contracts change. We argue that they change more continuously in democratic countries with institutionalized mechanisms of renegotiation, such as parliamentary debates, open public discourse and interest group lobbying. They are usually more resistant to change in autocratic countries that lack these mechanisms, including most countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Here, significant changes usually only take place if something unforeseen happens, such as a price shock, a pandemic, an earthquake or an invasion by a foreign country. At these ‘critical junctures’, at least one key actor in a country – often but not always the government – must react. This actor can, but does not have to, change its previous course. If they do change course on account of sufficiently influential drivers of change, often the social contract will also change.