Academic Autonomy Beyond the Nation-State

Other ways in which a certain “Europeanness” has been promoted in academic fields include the establishment of the European University Institute in Florence, Jean-Monnet-chairs (cf. Calligaro 2013, pp. 15–77) and the European Central Bank (Mudge and Vauchez 2016), amongst others.

One of these requirements is to situate the research project in the ERC’s structure of evaluation panels. The ERC’s peer review process operates with a nested structure of panels, each covering a number of academic disciplines and sub-disciplines. The top-level category “SSH” is made up of six sub-categories of panels which relate to broad disciplinary groups in the social sciences and humanities, e. g. “The Study of the Human Past”, “The Human Mind and Its Complexity” or “Individuals, Institutions and Markets”. Each of these is in turn subdivided into eleven to fourteen more specific sub-categories, e. g. “Macroeconomics”, “International trade” and “Banking, corporate finance, accounting” in the aforementioned panel “Individuals, Institutions and Markets”. Of course, this structure of thematic review panels influences the way in which the research summaries are written, and might also have a bearing on the prevalence and clustering of research topics. In the context of academic autonomy discussed here, it would be interesting to see how closely funded projects adhere to the formal structures of the ERC’s application procedure and whether specific projects or disciplines differ in this regard. Unfortunately, our data does not allow us to compare the panel structure to the statistically constructed research topics in a systematic manner. Nevertheless, our more inductive approach enables us to identify traces of these structural contexts as well as differentials of strategic compliance in the project summaries.

http://​cordis.​europa.​eu.

For example, the ERC Work Programme “encourages proposals of an interdisciplinary nature which cross the boundaries between different fields of research, pioneering proposals addressing new and emerging fields of research or proposals introducing unconventional, innovative approaches and scientific inventions.” (ERC 2015, p. 8) In our context, it is interesting to see how projects in different regions of the topic space respond to this demand with different self-representation strategies.

The data on nation-state references were obtained by screening the project summaries for mentions of six states which together receive 69.8% of all the ERC Starting Grants in our data set: UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands. These states are simultaneously the largest in Europe.