HunConCourt database

The dataset analyses the jurisprudence of the Hungarian Constitutional Court, covering the period between 2005 and 2017. It includes 1093 rulings of 386 decisions of the Court. We have collected data about more than 30 aspects of each ruling, including the petitioners, the competencies of the Court, the subject matter of the ruling, the disposition of the case and the voting pattern of the judges. These aspects are listed and explained in more detail in the codebook. The file ‘Rulings’ contains all the data of the searchable database. (http://www.hunconcourtdatabase.hu/site/database) Each row of the data file contains information about a ruling of the Court, including the votes of the judges. The variables and the possible values of these variables, except for the list of subject matters, are listed and explained in our codebook. The Codebook does not contain the list of constitutional subject matters. This list can be found in the ‘SubjectMatter’ file. We used a nested typology of constitutional subject matters that has two or three levels. This file helps the users of the database to understand how the subject matter of a ruling can be located in the matrix of constitutional concepts. The file also cross-references constitutional subject matters and the provisions of the Constitution/Fundamental Law by identifying the constitutional provisions that belong to a certain subject matter. Finally, the file lists the IDs of all rulings that are about the same subject matter. The file ‘ConstitutionalProvisions’ lists the title of each constitutional provision. The capital letters of these values refer to the 1949 Constitution (CON) or the 2011 Fundamental Law (FL), followed by the number and/or letter of the provision. To help researchers, we also added the English text of the provision. In addition, the file cross-references constitutional provisions and subject matters and identifies each subject matter that belongs to a certain constitutional provision. The file also lists the IDs of all rulings that relate to a provision of the Constitution/Fundamental Law. The file ‘Judges’ contains information about each judge, including their professional background and field of expertise. The file also lists the IDs of all rulings where the judge was involved in the decision-making process, acted as rapporteur or wrote or joined a separate opinion.