Connect 2 Congress: Visual Analytics for Civic Oversight

摘要

Strong representative democracies rely on educated, informed, and active citizenry to provide oversight of the government. We present Connect 2 Congress (C2C), a novel, high temporal-resolution and interactive visualization of legislative behavior. We present the results of focus group and domain expert interviews that demonstrate how different stakeholders use C2C for a variety of investigative activities. The evaluation provided evidence that users are able to support or reject claims made by candidates and conduct free-form, low-cost, exploratory analysis into the legislative behavior of representatives across time periods.