Public data, made plain
Games and tools built on public data, part of the România Interactivă project. Some start from your city hall: the budget and the elections. Others start from the whole country: how you think Romanians live, set against the official figures.
- towns and cities with 2025 budget data: 103 cities, 216 towns and the six districts of Bucharest
- 325
- localities, with elections from 1996 to 2025
- 3,186
- questions on how Romanians live, with INS and Eurostat figures
- 38
Your city hall, in numbers
The local budget is the most concrete thing a city hall produces, and one of the hardest to read. I built three tools that translate it: a receipt, a simulation in which you are the mayor, and a guessing game. The fourth project starts from elections: do mayors really bring votes in national elections? The projects are in Romanian.
Chitanța orașului (The city receipt)
“How much you paid your city last year, where the money went and how much of the approved budget was actually spent.”
- What you do
- You pick your city and your sources of income: salary, pension, rent, self-employment or royalties. You enter your income or your local taxes and get your receipt: your share of the city’s spending, by area.
- What else you see
- How your city compares with similar places, how much of the approved budget was actually spent, and how much of the budget can still be changed.
- Worth remembering
- Most spending is decided in advance. I split it into locked, rigid and flexible. Only the last group is decided year by year in the local council, and that is what is worth raising in the public debate on the budget.
Primar pentru un an (Mayor for a year)
“Be mayor for a year and balance your city’s 2026 budget.”
- What you do
- You start from your city’s real 2025 spending, choose a problem to solve and must balance the 2026 budget without a deficit. You can cut, invest, borrow or sell land. Five residents react to every decision.
- The rules, as in real life
- The operating budget (salaries, services, maintenance, subsidies) must be covered by current revenue.
- Loans can only fund investment, at an interest rate of about 7%.
- Any operating surplus can go towards investment.
- What you learn
- That every popular project competes with another for the same money.
- Where the numbers come from
- Unit costs come from public sources, and the effects on transport and street lighting from published studies (Paulley et al., 2006; Welsh and Farrington, 2008). The problems, the residents and the land value are illustrative.
Ghicește bugetul (Guess the budget)
“Eight questions about your city’s money: where it comes from, where it goes and how much of the approved budget was actually spent.”
- What you do
- You pick a city and answer eight questions about its money. You guess first, then see the real figure.
- What you learn
- How far intuition is from the official figures: spending in eight areas, revenue from six sources, and the gap between the approved and the spent budget.
- Good for
- A first look at a city budget. For the details, the full figures are in the city receipt.
Câte voturi aduce un primar? (How many votes does a mayor bring?)
“Do mayors really bring votes in national elections? Local, parliamentary and presidential elections from 1996 to 2025, side by side in 3,186 localities.”
- What you do
- You read ten short chapters next to a map of Romania by locality. Then you look up your own locality and see who the mayor is, how the mayor’s party did in the parliamentary and presidential elections, and how it compares with the rest of the county.
- What you learn
- That mayors do bring votes, but fewer than four years ago, and that the effect is newer than people think: it only appears in 2016. Where PSD narrowly won the mayor’s office in 2024, it got 5.5 percentage points more in the election for the Chamber of Deputies than where it narrowly lost. In 2020 the gap was 13.3 points; between 1996 and 2012, practically zero.
- Where the data come from
- Romania’s Permanent Electoral Authority (prezenta.roaep.ro and data.gov.ro) for 2016–2025 and the Code for Romania archive (rezultatevot.ro) for 1996–2012: official polling-station returns, added up by locality.
- What they don’t show
- Mayors who switch party after the election, and votes cast abroad or by post, which have no locality. The close-race test describes contested localities, not those where one party dominates.
About the budget data
Source
Romania’s Ministry of Finance (the Forexebug system), via Transparenta.eu: payments, receipts and approved budgets for 2025, extracted on 25–26 September 2026. Population from the 2021 national census (INS).
How reliable the figures are
Approved budgets are reconstructed from monthly reports, not copied from local council decisions. Each city has a grade: A (confirmed), B (probably correct) or C (uncertain).
What they don’t show
One year only. December budget amendments are missing. In small towns, one large EU-funded project can shift the percentages a lot.
These are interface prototypes, not official tools of any city hall.
Romania, in numbers
Everyone has a picture of how Romanians live: how much they earn, where they live, how long they live. Here you set it against the official figures.
How much of Romania can you see from your bubble?
“Each of us sees the country through the people around us, the news and what shows up on our phone. Guess how Romanians live, then see the real figure.”
- What you do
- You answer 7 questions on how Romanians live: money, housing, work, education and digital, health and population, the state and the environment. You move the slider to where you think the real figure is, then you see it, next to the European Union average.
- What you learn
- How much your bubble overlaps with Romania, on a scale from 0 to 100, and whether you see the country as rosier or gloomier than it is. You can challenge a friend with the same 7 questions.
- Where the data come from
- INS (Romania’s statistics institute) and Eurostat, with figures from 2021 on: 38 questions, each with its source. Only one is our own calculation: the adults the census did not find.
- What they don’t show
- How well you know the people around you. Official figures have their limits too: people who left the country, undeclared work and people the census missed do not appear in them. With only 7 questions, the score can vary by about 10 points.