This paper analyses how knowledge about the attitudes of the European population has been produced in the last more than 30 years. More specific the paper investigates how the European Value Study (EVS) has produced, what is regarded as high quality survey data about the Europeans attitudes towards issues such as family, government, European integration, church and chancing political issues. This paper tells the story about how the entanglement of academic interest, political anxieties and concerns alongside chancing social and political conditions has shaped the ways knowledge about European citizen’s attitudes towards about values, norms and central social and political institution. The EVS was established in the late 1970s by a heterogeneous group of European agents composed of academics, European bureaucrats, representatives from the church alongside agents from opinion pooling companies. They shared a concern about the future of European culture and social cohesion when central social institutions and value systems changes in the 1960s and 1970s and in the European integration processes. Since the first round in 1981 the EVS has changed several times in response to changing academic quality concerns and the political constitutions of Europe. The paper argues that we can understand the overall change in the organisation of the EVS as going from ‘issue driven’ to ‘data infrastructure’. Drawing on insides from science studies and political sociology, the paper highlights how social scientific knowledge production – even the ones perceived objective such as survey research – entangle with and are coloured by the political and social changes, institutions and concerns.
