Data from the European Social Study is helping governments across Europe address societal challenges, from trust in police to how to care for older people.
Europe faces urgent challenges. From migration to conflict, policymakers must allocate vast resources across diverse regions to drive meaningful change.
Yet, without reliable data, their decisions remain little more than educated guesses.
Governing Europe’s 500 million-plus citizens without data is like treating patients without examinations. From courtrooms to healthcare systems, European Social Survey (ESS) data has contributed to fundamental policy changes across Europe.
ESS has provided social survey data since 2001 which has been accessed by 254,000 users.
It is led by Professor Rory Fitzgerald, Director of the ESS and Professor of Practice in Survey Research at City St George’s, University of London. The Economic and Social Research Council is the largest single funder of the ESS.
Since 2013, the council has invested approximately £13 million in:
The ESS was founded in 2001 to provide European academics and policymakers with reliable public opinion data that could be compared between countries.
Professor Fitzgerald became director in 2013 and secured European Research Infrastructure Consortium status, establishing the ESS as a legal entity with multi-country funding.
The ESS conducts surveys every two years in over 30 countries to track social trends, collecting data from approximately 45,000 face-to-face interviews each time.
Professor Fitzgerald, explains:
Our job is to provide data, tools and resources to make the maximum use of the collected data. It’s not so much about what we do with the data at the end. It’s what everyone across Europe and beyond can do with it.
Crucially, ESS is a vital resource for academics, as they remain our most important user stakeholders. It’s academics who often do the research with ESS that feeds government policy.
From courtrooms to healthcare systems, ESS data has contributed to fundamental policy changes across Europe.
Bulgaria used it when creating laws on investment and immigration, while Latvia is incorporating ESS trust research into its National Development Plan through to 2027. Lithuania used ESS benchmarks to boost youth participation in civic life, and in Hungary, ESS analysis led to LGBTQI inclusion in Budapest’s equality programmes.
Meanwhile, using ESS data, Portugal found that citizens had very low trust in their courts. In response, it launched reforms that required all judges and prosecutors to undergo training that included a review of trust measurements, something no other country had done before.
Similarly, the UK’s National Audit Office and Ministry of Justice used trust-in-police data to transform how police inspectors monitor senior officers. And Sweden reviewed its police based on ESS public trust metrics.
ESS data also helped improve health and social services across Europe.
Estonia created comprehensive home care for older people, Finland designed its Universal Basic Income trial using ESS methods and Ireland developed ageing policies from ESS data.
The World Health Organization also used ESS findings to address health inequalities in:
A 2022 Technopolis report found that many governments now rely on ESS data for fact-based decision-making. Czechia includes ESS indicators in its quality-of-life reports, while France’s statistics office creates wellbeing briefings for the Prime Minister.
Germany has used ESS insights in eight different policy papers from 2017 to 2021, showing how the survey influences many areas from immigration to climate policy.
The Overton database, a vast digital library which tracks how research affects government policies, shows 3,183 policy references to ESS across 57 countries.
The ESS is evolving from face-to-face to self-completion data collection.
Professor Fitzgerald explains:
