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Monday | 03 July, 2017

Municipal Transparency Ratings

In 2014, CRRC-Georgia requested information from Georgian municipalities through the Ministry of Regional Development and Infrastructure (MRDI). Only 37 of 63 municipalities responded to our request. 31 of these provided some information. Only 17 provided complete information in response to our request. Based on this experience, CRRC-Georgia decided to rate the municipalities’ responses. While a score of 0 means that the municipality didn't respond at all, municipalities received 1 point for at least responding to the letter. Municipalities which received a score of 2 provided us with some of the information requested, while municipalities that scored 3 provided all requested information.



Months later, we repeated our endeavor. However, this time, freedom of information requests were submitted directly to the municipalities. This time around, we asked for data in an Excel file. Almost all the municipalities responded, however, the quality of responses varied. 44 municipalities sent Excel files and 39 contained the requested information. An analogous rating system was used to rate the responses to this round of freedom of information requests.



Based on these two rounds of our unintentional rating of municipal transparency, we created an index of municipal FOI transparency, summing up the two scores. Zero corresponds to no response for both rounds of requests while six reflects response with full data provided.

23.06.2014 | Monday

Trust in local government in Georgia

On June 15th Georgian voters headed to the polls in local elections. There were problems leading up to the elections as detailed in last week's electoral notes. At present, results show a significant portion of positions in local government going to Georgian Dream Coalition (GD) candidates, though a number of races will go into second rounds
27.11.2017 | Monday

Perceptions of professionalism, corruption, and nepotism in local government

Professionalism, honesty, and fair competition are important in any institution. Yet, incidents involving corruptionnepotism and/or a lack of professionalism are sometimes reported in the Georgian media when the work of local government bodies is covered. How does the public perceive local government? This blog post describes data from the June 2017 CRRC/NDI survey, which show that a majority of people in Georgia thought that there were problems with nepotism and a lack of professionalism in local government. Moreover, roughly half of the population thought that their local government also faces a problem with corruption.