On December 9, 2025, another student simulation game titled “Building Liberal Democracy Together!” took place.
For the third consecutive year, the Department of Political Science has organized a team-based educational simulation within the framework of the Jean Monnet Module project “Political Institutions and Systems in Europe: Comparison and Experience for Ukraine” under the Erasmus+ Programme. The event was held as part of the comparative politics curriculum for 4th- and 5th-year students enrolled in the project’s academic courses. This format enables participants to combine theoretical knowledge with practical modeling of political institutions and processes while also developing analytical, argumentative, and teamwork skills.
This year, the game once again featured three student teams, each acting as a group of “founding fathers” and “constitutional engineers” of their own newly established state. Their task was to design the institutional architecture of the state and determine its trajectory of democratic development. The expert jury was chaired by Professors Anatolii Romaniuk and Vitalii Lytvyn, who evaluated the quality of the proposed models and the teams’ arguments.
The first stage of the game focused on shaping the basic characteristics of newly created polities that had just emerged from authoritarian rule. The teams had to define the key parameters of their states: territory, population size, ethnic and religious composition, as well as the specifics of the economic structure and other fundamental factors influencing the future choice of political institutions.
The fate of each newly established country was then determined by a lottery draw. As a result of random combinations, three different state models were formed:
- a presidential federal state;
- a semi-presidential unitary decentralized state;
- a parliamentary unitary centralized state.
This stage provided each team with clear initial frameworks while simultaneously creating space for creative institutional design.
Each team demonstrated a high level of understanding of the specifics of interinstitutional relations, the functioning of party and electoral systems, and possible strategies of interaction with civil society, which in each of the “states” was unevenly distributed across different administrative units. These approaches allowed participants to explore various scenarios for organizing political processes and to test themselves in the role of “architects” of institutional systems. As a result, the teams gained a deeper understanding of the logic of constitutional and political engineering, adapting it to the conditions and challenges of their respective “states.”
Once again, the team simulation game confirmed the importance of combining theoretical knowledge with practical exercises. It is through such interactive formats that students are able not only to learn academic material but also to observe how political institutions and procedures function under conditions of realistic simulation.
The student team simulation game was prepared and organized by the Department of Political Science, the Center for Political Studies, and the student society “Polis” with the financial support of the European Union within the framework of the Erasmus+ Programme under the action “Jean Monnet for Higher Education” (Module “Political Institutions and Systems in Europe: Comparison and Experience for Ukraine,” No. 101126702).
