European research funding speaks the language of excellence, but a new study by two German researchers (Fuchs-Schündeln & Holub) suggests that scientific merit receives a more sympathetic hearing when applicants share their evaluators’ national affiliations. Published in Nature Human Behaviour, “Homophily in grant evaluations” examines 37,073 European Research Council applications and finds that reviewers award higher scores to applicants who share their country of work or citizenship, particularly when both coincide. Crucially, it compares different reviewers’ assessments of the same proposal, exposing a discrepancy between claims to judge scientific content and scores that shift with national affinity. Apparently, in the rarefied world of European scientific excellence, a proposal’s virtues become more readily apparent when the evaluator recognises a familiar flag.
This warning has a history stretching back more than five years, to 24 May 2021, when my post “New study suggest that prestigious European grants might be biased” discussed a Nature report on research examining the advantage associated with having an ERC panel member affiliated with the applicant’s intended host institution. Although institutional proximity and shared nationality represent different mechanisms, both raise an uncomfortable question that the rhetoric of excellence cannot convincingly answer, despite its repeated and solemn institutional assurances: how much does success actually depend on the scientific strength of a proposal, and how much on the composition of the panel entrusted with judging it?
What makes these findings so corrosive is not that reviewers are human, but that the system speaks with such confidence about its ability to keep human partiality out of scientific judgement. Rejected applicants receive sober assessments of ambition, feasibility and originality, with no indication of whether the absence of a shared national affiliation may have influenced their scores. Yet when reviewers assess the same proposal more favourably if they share its author’s national affiliations, the vocabulary of excellence begins to conceal precisely what it claims to measure. The cruelty lies in the asymmetry, those who benefit from affinity can comfortably believe they won on merit alone, while those disadvantaged by its absence are left to search their own work for deficiencies that may never have determined the outcome. A funding system that fails to separate excellence from familiarity risks doing more than misallocating money: it teaches researchers to mistake institutional partiality for personal inadequacy, then has the audacity to call that lesson a commitment to excellence.
PS - My earlier post, “Europe’s Humiliating Exodus: How Rigged Excellence Betrays Its Peripheral Talent”, acquires an especially bitter resonance in light of these findings, because a continent that lectures researchers about excellence owes them an explanation when national affinity helps determine how that excellence is recognised. Before commissioning another solemn report on the brain drain, Europe might examine whether its own funding machinery helps push talent towards the exit, while presenting those it leaves behind with another impeccable sermon on merit, delivered with all the usual institutional complacency.
