Funding

All participating countries are required to contribute to the central coordination costs, composed of a basic membership fee and an additional amount, calculated according to the GDP of each country. In addition, each country covers the cost of fieldwork and national coordination.

Prior to the award of ERIC status, the ESS was funded on a round-by-round basis. The central coordination and design was funded through the European Commission, the European Science Foundation (ESF) and national funding councils.

The Statutes of the ESS ERIC provide comprehensive details of the funding arrangements.

Active Horizon 2020 projects

Pilot Application in Urban Landscapes - towards integrated city observatories for greenhouse gases (PAUL)

The ESS is a partner in this Horizon 2020 project that aims to develop a systematic greenhouse gas measurement system for urban areas. Coordinated by ICOS - Integrated Carbon Observation System, it will bring together and evaluate the most innovative measurement approaches of greenhouse gas emissions in urban areas and will develop useful tools and services for cities to support their local climate action plans. ESS ERIC is the only social survey research project involved in the PAUL project, as part of a consortium of 31 partners from a range of scientific disciplines. The ESS ERIC will lead Task 1.3: The human dimension of climate policies: economic and behavioural impacts. The project will run until 30 September 2025.

ERIC Forum 2: Second implementation project for the ERIC Forum

The European Social Survey ERIC is participating in ERIC Forum 2 - a four-year project that brings together European Research Infrastructure Consortia (ERIC) across all scientific disciplines. The project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101124559.

ERIC Forum 2 aims to structure the cooperation between ERICs, support the implementation of the ERIC Regulation and services, and consolidate the integration of the ERICs in the European Research Area by deepening the ERIC Forum’s contribution to research policies. The project began on 1 September 2024 and follows on from an initial implementation project.

Infra4NextGen: Providing research infrastructure services to support Next Generation EU

Infra4NextGen is a €9.75m project being coordinated by the European Social Survey ERIC. The four-year project began on 1 March 2024. The project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101131118.

The project will compile existing outputs from key social science research infrastructures to inform the NextGenerationEU recovery plan and European Union youth policy. NextGenerationEU aims for Europe ‘to build a greener, more digital and more resilient future’ with a focus on five key areas: Make it Green; Make it Digital; Make it Healthy; Make it Strong; and Make it Equal.

In each of the five areas, an inventory of relevant items already fielded on cross-national surveys will initially be produced, including Eurobarometer, European Quality of Life Survey, the ESS, Generations and Gender Programme (GGP), European Values Study (EVS) and the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). Existing data from these surveys will be analysed and summarised to produce a series of policy-relevant tabulations and visualisations with commentary presented in a dedicated online portal.

This initial analysis will be supplemented with new data collected on each topic later in the project via our CROss-National Online Survey (CRONOS) Panel fielded over five waves in 11 countries (Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia and the United Kingdom).