LegiVis : visualizing the brazilian legislative process

Abstract

In modern democracies, bills go through a complex legislative pipeline before they be- come laws. In this work, we have developed LegiVis, a web-based visualization-centered solution aimed at helping experts and citizens better understand the legislative process and its dynamics. LegiVis features two complementary visualizations: one with an overview of the legislative process, showing the distribution of bills among the different organs of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies during a chosen period, and another depicting the particular legislative path of a user-selected bill. The application was designed based on discussions with two political scientists and a survey conducted with ordinary citizens, which collected answers from 71 respondents. After the first implementation, we per- formed a preliminary evaluation consisting of a non-structured interview with a political scientist and a short user study with 8 non-expert subjects. Based on this first assessment, we improved LegiVis and performed a second round of assessment, which consisted of two user experiments with 15 and 12 non-experts, respectively, and another one, with two experts, a political scientist and a journalist. Although the application was built around data from the lower house of the Brazilian Congress, its concept can be applied to other legislative bodies.