The world’s most successful governments increasingly build their decisions on data. The United Kingdom’s Behavioural Insights Team, Estonia’s digital public administration and Singapore’s evidence-based urban development all show the same thing: measurement and feedback produce better results than ideological conviction.

What is the situation in Hungary?

Most Hungarian policy decisions continue to rest on anecdotal experience, political bargains or ideological considerations. A few concrete problems:

  • Lack of impact assessment — Laws are passed without measuring their expected consequences
  • Programmes without feedback — Multi-billion-forint support programmes run for years without evaluation
  • Closed data — Data of public interest is hard to access, making independent analysis impossible

What does MIAK propose?

We consider three principles necessary:

  1. Every policy measure must be tied to measurable goals — what do we want to achieve, by when, and how will we measure it?
  2. Public data — research, statistics and background materials financed from public funds should be freely accessible
  3. Regular impact assessment — passing a law is not enough; whether it works has to be measured

Data-drivenness is not a technical question — it is the foundation of democratic accountability.

This is not a utopia. This is a method. And this is precisely what we are building our programme on.