California Proposition 54, 2016 (Prop 54) attempted to address gaps in government transparency at the state level by requiring legislative proceedings to be published on the internet, but failed to consider the traditional barriers that limit citizen participation in policy.
As most dedicated observers of voting bodies like the U.S. Supreme Court can attest, it is possible to guess vote outcomes based on statements made during deliberations or questioning by the voting members. We show this is also possible to do automatically using machine learning, potentially providing a powerful tool to ordinary citizens. Our working hypothesis is that verbal utterances made during the legislative process by elected representatives can indicate their intent on a future vote, and therefore can be used to automatically predict said vote to a significant degree.
A first-of-its-kind platform, Digital Democracy1 offers a searchable archive of all statements made in US state legislative hearings in four American states (California, New York, Texas and Florida) covering one third of the US population. The purpose of the platform is to increase government transparency in state legislatures. It allows citizens to follow state lawmakers, lobbyists, and advocates as they debate, craft, and vote on policy proposals. State hearings in the U.S. are typically recorded on video and broadcast on cable TV stations, but they are not transcribed or indexed.
The Digital Democracy platform obtains data about the legislative committee hearings: the video archives, the information about the state legislature and so on. Figure 1 shows the design of the DD system. The main source of information for the DD platform is the Cal Channel video archive of legislative sessions, a service provided courtesy of cable TV companies that operate in California.