In 1974, the Commission of the European Communities launched the Euro-Barometer surveys, a survey research program designed to provide regular monitoring of the social and political attitudes of representative national samples of the public of the nine- member nations, France, West Germany, Great Britain, Italy, The Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland and Luxembourg. The number of countries surveyed increased to ten in October, 1980, with the entry of Greece; and the number increased to twelve, with the addition of Spain and Portugal in October, 1985. Carried out in the Spring and Fall of each year, a total of 28 Euro-Barometer surveys had been completed by the end of 1987. In addition to obtaining regular readings on support for European integration, national goals and political issues, political party preferences, ideological orientations and subjective well-being, given Euro-Barometers have explored a variety of special topics such as attitudes toward poverty and unemployment, gender roles, interpersonal trust, energy and environmental problems, attitudes toward work and attitudes toward science and technology. The Commission of the European Communities sponsors these surveys in order to obtain feedback about the current state of public opinion in the member countries; it does not finance social science research per se. Accordingly, the Commission provides no funds for cleaning or archiving the data. Immediately after fieldwork, a set of tabulations is run to provide the basis for a twice-yearly report to the Commission. The data are then turned over to this project's principal investigator in a condition that the average user would find difficult to utilize. The data have not been cleaned, and their coding and format vary from country to country and from one survey to the next. Moreover, there is no codebook and little documentation of any kind beyond the questionnaires in the various languages used in the respective countries. This project makes available to social scientists the body of cross-national surveys carried out each Spring and Fall in each of the 12 European Community countries. The principal investigator will acquire the data, clean them, recode them in cross-nationally standardized form, prepare machine-readable codebooks for each survey and distribute them through the Inter- university Consortium for Political and Social Research survey data archive at the University of Michigan. One indicator of the value these data have for the social science community is the widespread demand for the surveys that have been released to date. The European Community surveys have become the third most widely-requested datasets handled by the Consortium, ranking immediately after the National Election Studies and the National Opinion Research Center General Social Surveys. In the field of Comparative Politics, nothing approaches their level of use. The datasets have been furnished to well over 200 different institutions, several of which are foreign survey data archives that service entire nations. The data are utilized in scores of publications each year, in the fields of political science, social psychology, sociology and economics.
