Creating acceptance for European Research Council evaluations

Throughout Chapter 4, I use a mix of documents, interviews, and observations to investigate how the peer review evaluations of early-career scientist applications for funding from the flagship Starting Grant (StG) scheme were organized and experienced during the ERC’s inaugural budgetary period. First, I discuss the main aspects of StGs, the reproach they initially faced, and the ways in which the ERC responded to this criticism. Then, I show that the ERC’s responses largely focused on portraying StG evaluations as impartial judgments of scientific quality, which featured respected panelists and rendered meritocratic allocations. Although I pay close attention to this portrayal, my investigation also considers how StG evaluations were perceived by a sample of evaluators, applicants, administrators, and department heads active in the Swedish research context.