Tracking Democratic Backsliding Through Social Contract Theory

Previous research has demonstrated the concept of the “social contract” to be useful for understanding why certain democratic regimes collapse while others remain stead-fast. While many studies within the democratic backsliding literature have touched on the “direct” causes of backsliding (executive aggrandizement, strategic manipulation) and long-term structural causes (grievances from globalization or cultural change), few approaches broach the question of backsliding from the subjective perspective of the citizenry. When they are, they are often simplified into latent concepts such as "dissatisfaction" or “distrust” in the government, “populist attitudes,” or “polarization,” without examining the specificities of these negative attitudes. As a result, we know little about how the underlying “social contract,” the implicit agreement between citizens and the state with regards to civil rights, obligations, and mutual regard, can fracture during the autocratization process. This study pursues this question by examining how social contract’s various domains shift before and after certain “critical junctures” in backsliding countries, such as the rise of illiberal parties to power, and specific actions such as Hungary’s 2011 constitutional reforms and Poland’s court-packing in 2015. Drawing on the framework developed by the Continuous Construction of Resilient Social Contracts Through Societal Transformations (CO3) project (see Erdoğan, Uyan-Semerci, and Erçetin, 2025), this study leverages time-series data (2002 to 2023) from the European Social Survey (ESS) to operationalize the six domains of the social contract: (1) ‘Citizenship Rights, Responsibilities, and Obligations’; (2) ‘Citizen-State Relations’; (3) ‘Legitimacy’; (4) ‘Social Cohesion and Mutual Regard’; (5) ‘Justice and Fairness’; and (6) ‘Challenges, Resilience, and Adaptation.’ We use these scales to examine the sequence in shifts in the social contract preceding and following critical junctures in backsliding countries in order to identify certain “warning signs” of backsliding, and consequences of these processes for the broader relations with the citizenry. Based on the established literature, we expect three primary pillars to collapse during the backsliding process: legitimacy (due to the increase in distrust in political institutions), social cohesion (due to the prominence of polarization promoting tolerance for norm violations and political violence against the other ‘camp’), and citizen-state relations (due to exclusionary dynamics which target immigrants and minority groups). Using four cases of backsliding in the European context, Hungary, Poland, Italy, and Greece, and four cases experiencing less backsliding, Finland, Norway, Ireland, and France, the analysis examines the sequence of shifts in the domains of the social contract preceding and following critical junctures in backsliding countries. Statistical analysis includes both an interrupted time-series analysis (ITS) to examine whether certain trends in domains of the social contract follow different trajectories following critical junctures in in backsliding cases, while regression analysis is used to identify shifts in each domain with each successive wave of the ESS. This study contributes to the literature on democratic backsliding by examining more causally “distant” subjective factors that lead to breakdown with more nuance than simplistic notions of “satisfaction with democracy,” and identifying “warning signs” of likely decline and pillars of the social contract which promote resilience in the face of autocratization.