The report empirically analyses information disclosure practices on 368 municipalities’ webpages in 2013 from the viewpoint of transparency, accountability, and informing citizens. The analysis is based on the laws regulating information disclosure in Hungary. The report measures the degree to which municipalities’ webpages abide by the prescriptions of these laws. The empirical results show that it is the lack of transparency and neglecting legal prescriptions which characterises urban settlements; read more

The transparency of government funding of the media is an essential element of the freedom of expression. However, this transparency is weak in the Hungarian media. The Hungarian media relies heavily on government advertisement spending. The public advertising orders can determine the fate of a media company. This dependency can threaten the freedom of the press since the government has the means to influence media content.  This report has been prepared to describe the role of state purchases in read more

Some of the information published online in the Public Procurement Bulletin (e.g. call for bids, tender results) is inaccurate. In cases when the Public Procurement Board (PPB) is informed about the error, for example by the issuer, a correction notice is published subsequently (e.g. rectification or modification) (regulations related to this are NFM 14/2010 [October 29th], and in NFM 92/2011 [December 30th]). Nevertheless, in some other cases, the original, incorrect announcement is published in read more

Although the Hungarian Public Procurement Authority has made all the information publicly available online for the public procurement tenders between 1998 and 2004, the data format is inappropriate for statistical analysis. The information is stored in basic HTML files which does not provide any interface for sorting and searching among the data. In this technical paper we describe our data extraction process which we used to turn the HTML based information into database format by extracting read more

The Hungarian Public Procurement Authority does not have such a database on Hungarian public procurements, that contains the documentation of each public procurement tender in a uniform structure: namely the call for tenders, the contract award notices, the contract fulfilment, and contract amendment notices or corrigenda.

The goal of CRBC is to solve this deficiency: we would like to build a uniformly structured database based on the publicly available documents of the Authority that is suitable read more

This short paper describes some basic characteristics of the Hungarian legislation in 1998-2012 through publicly accessible online administrative data. Our focus is to compare the 2010-2012 period to former years. We assume that these characteristics – the number of days elapsed between submitting a bill and the publication of the final law; the type of the person/organisation who submitted the bill; number of modifications that become necessary a short time after the publication of the law – can read more