As an important response to the financial crisis and the explosion of deficits and public debts around the world, the importance of applying fiscal rules and spreading fiscal councils has increased, in order to limit current fiscal policies, reduce deficits and debts, and improve public finance and fiscal discipline. However, the rules function in a political and economic environment. The efficiency thereof, as well as fiscal constraints, depends on politicians’ readiness to adhere to them, while more responsible, transparent and more sustainable public finance may contribute to the persistence of financial consolidation and the prevention of future fiscal crises. The hypothesis that the global financial crisis has led to the transformation and further regulation of the financial system in the most developed countries in the world, while the application of the rules and functioning of the councils remains an important but inadequate step to limiting the political power that contributed to the debt crisis, has been confirmed in this dissertation by the qualitative research methodology (research of the literature, political-economic and media context). In further elaboration of the theory, hypothesis H1 (fiscal rules have to exist to keep debts of the state at some sustainable levels) and H2 (fiscal rules show excessive government spending) are confirmed by a qualitative research method based on theoretical analysis (literature research and parallel proving of the theory of the rules application and the councils activities in the EU countries, and the political-economic and media context). It has been shown that EU rules are well-placed in theory, but in practice they do not provide the expected results and are not sufficient to establish fiscal discipline. The visibility and the amount of excessive government spending depend on fiscal transparency and (politicians*) accountability in the budget process, which the media can have an impact on. Significant overlapping of the results of the various applied analyses (descriptive, correlation and cross-tabulation analyses) of the results of the questionnaire conducted among the 18 councils in the EU and the examples of six councils confirmed the assumption H3 (fiscal councils give warning about excessive government spending, and the media inform the public of it which itself can then force politicians, by having an impact on their rating at the elections and on their reputation, to behave more transparently and responsibly). More precisely, all of the categories extracted from the questionnaire and measured in this dissertation, each have a significant impact and synergistically have an effect on the transparency and (politicians’) accountability in the budget process. In addition, it has been established that the system of rules and councils influences fiscal transparency and (politicians’) accountability in the budget process by monitoring the adherence to the rules, legislative regulation and communication with the public, as well as that greater media visibility and more effective communication among councils can contribute to transparency and (politicians’) accountability in the budget process. Parliaments, unlike the councils, are political institutions and are thus perceived in the public. The councils, on the other hand, are uniquely positioned to enhance transparency and accountability and to provoke the influence on the politicians’ reputation by the assessments and analyses having the media-impact, but also by their own actions serving as models of transparency. They encourage the public and the government responses as well as more transparent and accountable public finance management if the media can speak freely and the degree of democracy is high in a country. Therefore, the rules and the councils can become a powerful means of communication, whereby it is important that the councils put more effort into communicating with the public and take into account the proposed logic of media influence of the councils themselves in order to significantly increase their impact on the transparency and (politicians’) accountability in the budget process. * refers to politicians in executive power