Research question/goal:

The project ‘Public Opinion of European Societies in Change’ (EIPS) aimed to co-ordinate cooperation among the currently leading Internet panel surveys on public opinion about political reform-making through EU-wide funding. Given the complexity of policy reforms, the goal was to provide an accurate, longitudinal representation of the European population, enabling (experimental) causal analyses. Great importance should also be attached to the quality of data generation, for example by means of random sampling of the respective population samples. In detail, EIPS aimed to offer the following possibilities:

1. It should provide different user groups with individual level cross-national survey data on various social science topics (i.e. of interest to political scientists, sociologists, economists, psychologists, methodologists, etc.).
2. It should enable measurement of attitude changes with regard to treatments (policy reforms, exogenous shocks) via an online tool.
3. The panel design should allow for tracking of individual-level attitude changes over time.
4. Experiments should be performed online and allow for randomization of subgroups (with and without treatment).
5. The samples should be based on random samples of the general population to reduce selection bias.
6. EIPS should be open to users requiring cross-national comparative data.

Participants included the University of Mannheim, the University of Tilburg, Science Po Paris, the Universities of Ljubljana, Bergen and Iceland and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. A grant proposal was submitted as part of a call for proposals for infrastructure development in the EU research program. Associated members were the KU Leuven and the University of Ghent, the University of Nicosia, the Czech Academy of Sciences and Charles University, the Universities of Thessaloniki and Bologna as well as the Vytautas Magnus University.

Despite the great interest in the project and an assessment by two reviewers that was above the requirements, the project was not accepted for funding. Overall, the funding rate for this call was unusually low at less than 14 percent.