ESS-DACE aims to secure the continuation and consolidation of the European Social Survey (ESS) as a key data source for measuring and understanding long-term changes in public attitudes across Europe. This will be achieved by strengthening the links between the 7 institutions responsible for the central design and coordination of the ESS infrastructure, as well as between the ESS and its funders, data users, national teams and a distinguished network of advisers. The objectives of the ESS infrastructure are: to chart and explain changes in Europe’s social, political and moral climate (WP2, WP4); to achieve and spread improved standards of rigour in cross-national social measurement, and simultaneously to raise the threshold standards of national surveys (WP3, WP5, WP7, WP12); to introduce and encourage the use of soundly-based attitudinal indicators of national progress, based on citizens’ judgments of key aspects of their societies (WP6); to undertake and facilitate the training of European researchers in comparative quantitative measurement and analysis (WP9); to provide enhanced access remotely to the users of and participants in the infrastructure (WP8); to improve the visibility and outreach of quantitative data on social change to academics, policy makers and the wider public (WP5, WP10, WP11); to maintain and update a specially-created ‘contextual’ data repository to help isolate the independent effect of background political and social developments on shifts in attitudes and values (WP13) and to refine the financial, operational and organisational arrangements of the ESS infrastructure to suit its longer term perspectives and commitments (WP3). This application is to ensure not just the survival of the ESS time series, but also to consolidate its achievements by creating a transparent, accessible and increasingly valued mechanism for unpicking the relationship between Europe’s changing institutions and the shifting values of its people.