Can People Help Legislators Make Better Laws? Brazil Shows How

In this article, Cristiano Faria presents e-Democracia, a Brazilian legislative website launched to engage citizens in the legislative process of the Brazilian House of Representatives. (See Related Summaries for further information on eDemocracia.) In the following excerpt, he shares the preliminary conclusions from an initial analysis of the legislative-citizen involvement website, including several obstacles to overcome.

"1. Real impact on bill drafts

One important issue that normally causes digital participation to fail is the lack of connection between people’s contributions and how laws are actually drafted. Writing legal text involves great technical complexity. e-Democracia has minimized this problem by engaging the assistance of legislative consultants, who serve, essentially, as “technical translators” during the entire participatory process.

Participants of the youth statute TLC have posted comments and discussed several ideas during recent months. Legislative consultants summarized this participatory content and presented it to the lawmaker in charge of drafting the bill. After her approval, the legislative consultants transformed her suggestions into legal text. Then, the lawmaker herself submitted it to the Youth Affairs Committee....

2. Multiple participatory mechanisms

People in contemporary societies have very diverse interests, experiences, expertise and values. In my opinion, the great challenge in making social participation feasible is to find out how to take advantage of such diversity and incorporate it in the policy-making system. The engine behind e-Democracia is a ‘multiple participatory mechanism,’ a kind of electronic, permeable sponge that enables people to share their professional experience and expertise, express their personal and collective interests and values, and foster creative ideas in different forms and intensity, in all phases of the policy-making cycle.

In a real democratic public arena, participatory platforms should encourage any contribution that citizens are able to make, or want to deliver. Some people are interested in discussing ideas at public forums and others simply want to offer useful and strategic information for legislative decision-making, or vote to rank the best ideas, and so on. Furthermore, many people might just want to watch and follow the legislative debate.

e-Democracia also offers a specifically designed application to stimulate legislative participation in a collaborative environment. In the Wikilegis, users can elaborate their own version of a bill or suggest amendments to existing bills while simultaneously discussing and qualitatively evaluating bill proposals.

 Thus, any kind of input should be taken into consideration. By “crowdsourcing” ideas, arguments and information, politicians will be able to better diagnose targeted public problems in the current political agenda. In simple words, e-Democracia was designed to give a voice to anyone anywhere at any time (during the legislative schedule). However, it is still far from achieving this because the digital divide is still very great in Brazil. Only one third of the Brazilian population has access to the Internet.

I must admit: some of the interactive instruments have been underused and the overall participation flows somewhat chaotic. People are free to introduce information into the system in different ways, posting a message in forums, writing at the Wikilegis, uploading reports and so on. For this reason, it demands more management from the administrative staff to put all this content together to make sense. Future improvements in the design of e-Democracia might help to avoid confusion and thereby offer a more understandable view of citizen participation.

3. Transparency

In addition to the benefits of engaging citizens who do not often have access to the national policymaking center at Brasilia, e-Democracia has brought increased legislative transparency. During virtual discussions, Brazilian society has tracked virtual legislative debates and their repercussions in face-to-face events in the House of Representatives. Not only do the most active participants now better understand legislative procedures, which are normally complex and confusing, but also all participants of the youth statute legislative community grasp them.

Citizens can also see what was actually proposed by citizens and compare it to the actual bill that is drafted. This brings disclosure to the lawmaking process because people can use the public participatory process to demand that their representatives explain why certain suggestions and ideas were considered instead of others. Moreover, after a first round of public participation in the debate on the youth statute, participants pressed the Youth Affairs Committee lawmakers for a decision on the issue.

4. Civic education

One other important conclusion: some people do not understand what e-Democracia is and how to use it. People in general hardly know that legislative procedures involve several steps to achieve a final result, the legal text. Therefore, any digital mechanism, such as e-Democracia, must develop specific tools for the legislative education goal.

Graphics, explanatory videos and other tutorial gadgets can help this process by conducing digital participants on a journey to legislative discussion. In addition, forum moderators should guide the discussion and insert tips about legislative procedures. I believe that we can also have more entertaining platforms to stimulate people to join in. In this matter, experiments, such as e-Democracia, can be a kind of “serious game” in which virtual platforms would simulate real decision-making.

5. Congressmen engagement

Yes, the engagement of politicians in virtual discussions is relevant to their success. It is a symbolic demonstration of respect to society. The debate of the youth statute engaged some (not many) active congressmen in it. For example, Representative Manuela D’Avila is the lawmaker in charge to formulating the first draft of the youth statute. Besides being quite young (28 years of age) and used to blogs, Twitter and other Web 2.0 tools, Manuela represents a new generation of politicians who intend to have a more dynamic relationship with her voters and the nation’s citizens. She has twittered e-Democracia happenings.

However, this raises an important issue. Are congressmen in general ready to take part at digital activities? As most of them do not have time for this (most are not even familiar with social media) they surely need “digital ghost-writers” to act as avatars on their behalf.

6. Digital Connectors

One of the most interesting messages posted at the e-Democracia platform was put forward for a native from the Amazon in Brazil. She did not present any substantial ideas to the discussion, but her participation helps to enlighten unexplored paths of inclusiveness in the legislative decision-making process - the connection between the online world and offline participants. That native is a leader of a local native youth community of a certain tribe in the Amazon jungle....She is a potential connector between the online participation in the Brazilian House of Representatives and the offline community group that she leads, simply by using a personal computer and dial-up Internet access. Thus, a greater effort from the House should be made to aggregate several cross-country connectors and include more offline people in digital legislative discussions."