This paper illustrates by means of quantitative analysis the watchdog potential of e-Government instruments on the example of the Czech Public e-Procurement Information System. This System is an electronic portal, where public authorities are obliged to announce their intention to purchase goods and services.
In theory, these announcements published in a structured form on this portal are monitored by private entities that can submit their offers and compete thus for the respective public contract. In our paper we used a web robot to collect data about public procurements from the Czech System and utilized them for construction of a composite Transparency Index of public institutions that award public contracts.