"When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be."
Lord Kelvin

Impact Assessments, Public Consultation and Legislation in Hungary

This research explores important characteristics of the Hungarian legislation from 2010 through publicly accessible online administrative data. Our focus is measuring the quality of legislation, analysing its trends since 2006. The CRCB published its first analysis in July 2014 on the period of 1998-2012, which examined the quality of the Hungarian legislation. Our reports are not simple repetitions and updates. We extended and deepened our analysis in several areas. For instance, conserning the report of 2015 we not only analysed the activities of the parliament by statistical methods (i), but also occurrences of public consultations (ii), and the process of drafting a law and of conducting impact assessment (iii) and report five case studies on law making process (iv).

An important novelty of these reports is that by using objective indicators, they try to give a picture of the quality of the preparation of laws and legislation in Hungary. For this we use publicly available data that can be found on the websites of the government and the Hungarian Parliament, and other online sources. Based on the publicly available data we are primarily interested in finding out what happened in the areas examined and to what extent the legislative procedure makes it possible for stakeholders to be informed and take part in the process of the preparation of laws (i), to what extent preliminary impact assessments and analyses support the laws made by the Hungarian parliament (ii), and to what extent the approved laws can contribute to legal certainty (iii).

 

The 2014 report (pdf) 
The 2015 report (pdf)
The 2016 report (pdf)