Review of GESIS (2012-2014): The EU Neighbourhood Barometer (ENB)

Description

The EU Neighbourhood Barometer (ENB) is a large-scale comparative public opinion survey commissioned by the European Commission and implemented between 2012 and 2014 across sixteen European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) countries and Russia. The dataset measures citizens’ perceptions of the European Union, governance, socio-economic conditions, values, and media consumption. Conducted through six waves of nationally representative face-to-face interviews with approximately 1,000 respondents per country, the ENB comprises around 100,000 interviews overall. The data are available in SPSS and Stata formats, supported by multilingual questionnaires, codebooks, and weighting schemes, enabling robust cross-country and regional analyses.

The ENB demonstrates high reliability, comparability, and transparency in data structure and methodology, though documentation gaps, such as missing response-rate details and incomplete fieldwork metadata, limit full replication. Ethical standards and data protection requirements are rigorously upheld, with anonymised microdata accessible through the GESIS Data Archive for non-commercial research. Widely used in both academic and policy-oriented studies, the ENB provides unique empirical insight into public opinion trends in the EU’s eastern and southern neighbourhoods, making it a valuable resource for assessing EU influence, legitimacy, and regional engagement strategies.

Countries

Armenia Azerbaijan Belarus Georgia Moldova Other Russia Ukraine

Keywords

Social Movements Public Governance Political Culture Public Opinion Polls Foreign Policy Migration Institutional Trust Democracy Cross-National Survey

Language of data

English

Disciplines

Communication Studies Development Studies European Studies Political Science Sociology

Methods of data collection

Face-To-Face Survey Public Opinion Poll