Abstract Integrated assessment and energy system models are challenged to account for societal transformation dynamics to produce feasible low-carbon pathways. Yet, empirical evidence is lacking on which factors should be incorporated, how and to what extent this would improve the quality and relevance of modeled pathways. Here, we include six societal factors related to (i) infrastructure dynamics, (ii) actors and decision making and (iii) societal and institutional context into an open-source simulation model of the national power system transition. We apply this model for 31 European countries and, using hindcasting (1990–2019), quantify which societal factors improved the modeled pathways. We find that, if well-chosen and in most cases, incorporating societal factors can improve the hindcasting performance by up to 24% in terms of modelled installed capacity of individual technologies, but there are also situations where hindcasting performance can become worse. The combinations of most relevant societal factors differ among countries and model outputs, but infrastructure lock-in, public acceptance and investment risks contribute more strongly and frequently to model performance improvement. Our study hence paves the road to evidence-based choice of societal factors to be included in energy transition modeling in a systematic and transparent way.