Continuous construction of the social contract and the case of the EP2024

The social contract has always been an imagined construct with limited community as the assumed basis of the contractual parties, as Carole Pateman’s seminal critique has revealed. In the contemporary era, the social contract is in question in many ways, this paper proposes seeing it as a continuously constructed as response to ruptures or crisis in society. The participation of minorities in the social contract, the need for a green social contract are but some of the challenges that need to be addressed. The key criticism to the liberal democratic model is the taken for grantedness of the social contract. In this presentation we discuss how the social contract basis could be explored by operationalising a tool familiar from the research on populism directing our gaze to the ‘us’ and the liminal otherness in the continuous articulation of the bases and parties of the social contract. We introduce the populism formula (Palonen) that is one of the heuristic bases of the CO3 project research. Furthermore, for the ECPR, in the election year 2024 we shed light from our case study that explores how the Europeans are voting in the European Parliamentary elections, we discuss some of the initial observations from our comparative research. What would be the bases on which the social contract is continuously negotiated? Who would think that Europe would be the legitimate polity around which the social contract would be constructed? This paper discusses the theoretical approach of the CO3 horizon project (2024-2026) on the social contract.