[1][2] Professor Rory Fitzgerald is the Director of the ESS which in 2013 became a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC).
The ESS was initiated by the European Science Foundation under the leadership of Sir Roger Jowell and Max Kaase 1995 and established in 2001 at the National Centre for Social Research (now NatCen Social Research) in London.
[3] One of the reasons to start this new time series of social scientific data was that existing cross-national attitude surveys were regarded as not of sufficient methodological rigour to draw on as reliable sources for knowledge about changes over time in Europe.
In 2016, the ESS became a landmark of the ESFRI roadmap in recognition of its consolidation.
[7] In 2005 the ESS was the winner of the Descartes Prize, an annual European science award.