From Citizen to Senator: Artificial Intelligence and the Reinvention of Citizen Lawmaking in Brazil

Written in March, 2025

Co-authors:

• Luís Kimaid, Executive-Director at Bússola Tech;

• Alisson Bruno de Queiroz, e-citizenship coordinator at the Senado Federal of Brazil;

• Beth Simone Noveck, Director at the Governance Lab.

When an 82-year-old retiree from the coastal city of Maceió called Brazil's Senate hotline to suggest that medication labels needed larger font sizes, he had no idea that a senator from Amazonas would champion his simple suggestion. Across the country, Alessandro from Minas Gerais proposed legislation to prevent internet service providers from throttling speeds for services like Netflix—five years later, his net neutrality idea became reality. These citizens are not anomalies but participants in Brazil's systematic approach to democratic engagement.

Imagine a democracy where ordinary people have influenced 46 legislative bills through more than 120,000 submitted ideas and 11 million votes.

From a proposal to end housing subsidies for deputies and judges and terminate perks for former presidents to the idea to legalize marijuana and ban straws, the public has had a significant impact on lawmaking.

While none of the resident proposals have become law as is (citizen proposals are only 140 characters), their input has helped to shape the legislative process. Unlike most nations where citizen participation remains limited to periodic voting or the occasional town hall, Brazil has built four robust, integrated participatory channels that invite citizens into every stage of governance. Through these channels, Brazilians can propose laws, question witnesses, participate in educational workshops to learn how to craft legislation, and vote on pending bills—creating an ecosystem of engagement unseen elsewhere.

This isn't a theoretical vision—it's Brazil's current reality. In most democracies, the public exercises political power primarily at the ballot box every few years before returning to the sidelines. Brazil's Federal Senate, however, has reimagined this relationship, transforming citizens from occasional voters into active participants in lawmaking.

The system faces challenges—it is time consuming, often duplicative, hard to manage, and produces primarily indirect legislative outcomes. But now Brazil has the opportunity to use artificial intelligence to supercharge this participation and make it more directly relevant. As LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman writes in his new book Superagency: “Instead of thinking of AI first and foremost as a mechanism that could be harnessed for command and control governance, through applications like facial recognition, predictive policing, and algorithmic surveillance, we can choose a future where AI is used to connect citizens more substantively to legislative processes.”

The Brazilian Senate’s established participatory framework provides the perfect foundation for AI enhancement, allowing Brazil to overcome existing limitations while building on citizen engagement mechanisms already deeply integrated into its democratic institutions.

The Legislative Idea Platform: The People’s Proposals

Through the Senate's e-Citizenship website, any Brazilian can propose new laws directly to their Senators. The process, known as the Legislative Idea, launched in 2012 and is remarkably accessible—citizens submit a brief tweet-length proposal with their first name and state of residence. For those who prefer speaking or are less comfortable with technology, a toll-free number connects them with Senate staff who capture and submit their ideas online. Additionally, people who are deaf can submit ideas in sign language by sharing a video with the e-Citizenship team.

The Senate's 15-person e-Citizenship team reviews submissions—over a thousand each month—to ensure they comply with constitutional requirements. Once approved, ideas remain open for public support for four months. The three most voted-up ideas from the last 24 hours are displayed on the portal's homepage, encouraging public review and participation.

If a proposal collects 20,000 signatures, it is sent to a committee where it can be developed into either a formal bill or a proposal for constitutional amendments. While Senators don't always wait for these thresholds—they can champion promising ideas earlier in the process—the Human Rights and Participatory Legislation Committee plays a key role in transforming qualified proposals into formal legislation. The system has proven remarkably engaging, with over 11 million signatures recorded across various legislative ideas.

Recently, a suggestion to "Use the billion-dollar budget approved for electoral campaigns to rebuild Rio Grande do Sul, specifically the areas affected by the biggest environmental and humanitarian disaster in the region” was approaching the 20,000 up-vote threshold.

Challenges and Limitations of the Legislative Idea Process

While the Legislative Idea process has successfully brought citizen voices into Brazil's lawmaking, several challenges remain. Achieving tens of thousands of up-votes is a substantial hurdle, especially since only the most popular proposals appear on the home page. With over a thousand ideas submitted monthly, promising proposals can be overlooked. Additionally, similar ideas often split support across multiple proposals, diluting their impact.

Upgrading the Legislative Idea with AI

Generative AI (GenAI), a form of machine learning which recognizes patterns in language, could significantly reduce duplication. GenAIcan analyze new submissions against existing ones, flagging overlapping content, allowing Senate staff to automate the process of inviting submitters to join existing proposals before posting their own. This step could reduce fragmentation of support and streamline the review process.

Beyond reducing duplication, AI could also help Senate staff to organize proposals by theme, giving political leaders insight into public concerns categorized by geography and topic. GoVocal, a citizen engagement company in Belgium and Remesh, another engagement platform from the United States, have both developed clustering algorithms for grouping related ideas that, if used, could facilitate a more holistic approach to addressing public issues.

The current system's display of only the three most popular ideas on the front page limits exposure for newer submissions. Iceland's Better Reykjavik platform, developed by the nonprofit technology provider Citizens Foundation, randomizes the display of public submissions to ensure all ideas get public exposure.

Brazil could implement AI-driven rotation that's more sophisticated than simple randomization. Algorithms could prioritize ideas based on engagement metrics and relevance to current events, ensuring that trending proposals are highlighted while giving less popular submissions fair visibility. Such a dynamic system could adjust featured submissions based on community interests, fostering inclusive discourse by highlighting resonant ideas.

One persistent challenge in public consultation is the overwhelming volume of diverse comments that parliamentary officials must process. Brazil needs a system that can categorize feedback based on key themes, sentiments, and patterns, helping to distill complex inputs into concise summaries while ensuring diverse viewpoints aren’t lost. Fortunately, they can build on promising research in this area. Google DeepMind's recent "Habermas Machine" experiment involving over 5,000 participants demonstrated that AI could effectively synthesize diverse viewpoints into consensus statements that participants found clearer and more representative than those created by human mediators. The system was particularly adept at incorporating minority perspectives rather than simply reflecting majority opinions. By adapting similar technology, Brazil could more effectively integrate the full spectrum of citizen perspectives into the legislative process, making the overwhelming task of processing public input both more manageable and more inclusive.

The Interactive Event: Citizen Participation in Senate Hearings

Unlike in-person attendees who must remain silent in the Senate gallery, Brazilian citizens can actively participate in committee hearings through the e-Citizenship portal or a toll-free hotline. In 2024 alone, the public submitted 69,000 questions across 440 committee hearings. Senators read or responded to 90% of these questions.

The e-Citizenship team selects and relays the most relevant citizen questions to committee chairs. The process has become so integral that Senators now expect these public inputs—as one staff member notes, “If we are late, which is rare, the Senator asks, 'where's the list of questions?' Public comments have become the rule, rather than the exception.”

Challenges and Limitations

Despite its success, the Interactive Event faces significant challenges. Processing tens of thousands of questions requires substantial staff resources. Ensuring selected questions are relevant, constructive, and representative of diverse viewpoints requires careful curation. The current manual process may not always capture the most impactful or pertinent questions. Additionally, staff must maintain parliamentary decorum by filtering inappropriate content.

Despite efforts to notify a wide range of potentially interested parties, there's a risk that certain demographics or interest groups may be overrepresented in the question pool, potentially skewing the focus of hearings.

Upgrading the Interactive Event with AI

AI is already beginning to transform the hearing process. The e-Citizenship team currently uses AI to select the best and most relevant questions from citizens, but the technology offers far more potential. The team is turning to generative AI to write brief summaries of events to help the public understand the topics of congressional hearings.

With text-to-video and audio capabilities, AI could transform written backgrounders into short videos, slide decks, or podcasts, making information more intelligible to those without policy backgrounds. For example, NotebookLM, a free tool from Google, creates podcasts from documents. While currently available only in English, a Portuguese version could generate conversational discussions of upcoming hearings, making complex topics more accessible to average citizens.

Currently, submissions are only accepted in Portuguese. In the future, AI translation could accommodate questions in other languages and handle transcription and organization of voice or video submissions. These content sorting tools would reduce staff workload, route queries to the appropriate committee chairs more efficiently, and ensure diverse topics are addressed during hearings.

For citizens, AI-powered chatbots could help navigate the process of submitting questions, understanding hearing procedures, and accessing information about discussion topics. This would lower barriers to participation, especially for first-time users or those less familiar with legislative processes.

Integrating AI-driven transcription into committee meetings could further enhance efficiency. By transcribing discussions in real-time, AI could compare these transcripts with submitted questions to identify whether certain topics have already been addressed and suggest which citizen the Senator should recognize next. The system could also recommend follow-up questions that logically extend the current discussion, ensuring more coherent and productive dialogue. This would streamline moderation and maintain hearing flow, enabling Senators to focus on relevant and timely queries.

AI could play a critical role in parliamentary committee engagements by moderating citizen interactions during public hearings and consultations. Beyond simply filtering inappropriate content, AI tools could organize citizen questions to ensure the most relevant and constructive issues are addressed while maintaining focused discussion. AI-powered transcription could compare citizen inputs across sessions, preventing repetitive discussions and highlighting unresolved topics. Instead of simple yes/no votes, AI could facilitate online deliberation forums where citizens discuss bills in real-time, with the system analyzing these discussions to provide lawmakers with nuanced insights into public sentiment, concerns, and suggestions.

The e-Citizenship team has already experimented with using AI to generate comprehensive reports summarizing hearings and plans to make this a standard practice. These reports would provide valuable records for both Senators and the public in understanding hearing outcomes and impacts.

Early experiments with immersive virtual worlds have been attempted but haven't persisted due to the expense and distraction of headsets and goggles. As technology evolves to become more accessible, AI could create virtual environments for hearings, allowing citizens to feel present and engaged when participating remotely. Instead of typing a question and watching on YouTube, participants could experience being in the virtual gallery.

By leveraging these AI-driven enhancements, the Brazilian Senate could significantly improve the efficiency, accessibility, and effectiveness of the Interactive Event process, fostering even greater public participation in the democratic process.

Legislative Workshop: Young Minds Shaping Policy

To train the next generation of citizens, the Brazilian Senate has developed a curriculum for elementary, secondary, and higher education that enables schools and universities to teach young people how to develop legislative ideas under teacher guidance. The e-Citizenship team conducts regular outreach to university leadership to promote youth involvement and foster civic engagement among Brazilian young people.

This investment in civic education has yielded results: 10% of submissions to the legislative ideas site now come from educational institutions, with students having developed two thousand different legislative proposals. In 2023 alone, more than 1,500 teachers registered to conduct Legislative Workshops in a hundred cities across every state in the country.

Students learn about governance while digging deeply into national problems to develop legislative solutions, which they discuss in the classroom. In universities, this exercise is often integrated into political science or public administration courses, where students learn about the branches of government, institutional jurisdiction, and the lawmaking process before developing ideas to improve legislation.

The program has been inclusive, with workshops conducted in schools for those with intellectual disabilities. One compelling example came from Marcelo Siqueira from the Federal District, who proposed introducing hanging vegetable gardens to promote healthy eating in centers that educate those with disabilities. While the proposal received few up-votes, Senator Paulo Paim of Rio Grande do Sul found merit in the idea and introduced it as legislation. As Senator Paim noted, "Participation in this type of activity has widely recognized benefits in terms of mental health, strengthening community ties and the comprehensive development of children and young people, in addition to contributing to the sense of belonging of the elderly and people with disabilities."

Challenges and Limitations

Despite its success in engaging young people in the legislative process, the Legislative Workshop program faces several hurdles. The quality and feasibility of student proposals vary widely, requiring significant resources for review and refinement. Ensuring equitable access across diverse school systems remains a challenge, potentially limiting the program's reach. Moreover, maintaining student engagement beyond the workshop and translating enthusiasm into long-term civic participation poses ongoing difficulties.

Upgrading the Legislative Workshop with AI

By incorporating AI technologies, the Legislative Workshop could become even more widespread and impactful, revolutionizing how young people learn about and participate in the legislative process.

One of the most significant improvements would be personalization. AI could analyze each student's interests, learning style, and progress to create tailored learning paths within the curriculum. This would ensure students remain engaged and challenged regardless of their starting knowledge level. For students with disabilities, AI could provide real-time captioning, text-to-speech, or other assistive technologies to ensure equal participation, making the program truly inclusive.

Beyond individual learning, AI could foster unprecedented collaboration. By registering their initial interests, AI could suggest potential partnerships between students or classes working on similar topics, fostering cross-school collaboration and idea exchange. Classrooms could organize online discussions around their projects and work on joint proposals, rather than duplicating efforts and overwhelming Senate staff with numerous underdeveloped ideas.

This collaborative approach could extend internationally as the Legislative Workshop concept spreads to other countries. Brazilian students could collaborate with peers from the United States, India, or Nigeria on global issues like climate change or digital privacy rights. AI-powered translation tools would break down language barriers, enabling truly global civic engagement among youth.

To enhance the learning experience, AI could power virtual simulations of the legislative process. Using AI-driven virtual or augmented reality, students could participate in lifelike recreations of parliamentary debates or committee hearings. These simulations could adapt in real-time based on students' decisions, providing a dynamic learning experience that brings the legislative process to life more effectively than textbooks.

AI could also provide instant, constructive feedback on students' legislative proposals, highlighting areas for improvement and suggesting resources for further learning. This would complement teacher guidance and allow for more rapid iteration of ideas, leading to better proposals and a higher likelihood of student ideas becoming actual legislation. The AI could be trained on successful past proposals and current legislative priorities, ensuring relevant and actionable feedback.

Finally, AI could help students navigate the complex ethical considerations inherent in lawmaking. An AI system could prompt students to consider various ethical implications of their proposed legislation, encouraging critical thinking about the broader impacts of laws on diverse populations. This could include simulations of how a proposed law might affect different demographic groups or regions over time, giving students a deeper understanding of the far-reaching consequences of legislation and the importance of thoughtful lawmaking.

The Legislative Workshop program represents a powerful investment in Brazil's democratic future. By engaging young people directly in the legislative process, it not only educates them about governance mechanics but also instills civic responsibility and empowerment. The program's success in generating thousands of student-led proposals, some influencing actual legislation, demonstrates its potential to shape a more engaged and informed citizenry.

As these young participants grow into voting adults, they carry with them not just knowledge of how laws are made, but the confidence and experience that has come from participation and that might blossom into even more active citizenship.

Public Consultation: A Citizen Referendum

The Federal Senate has also created an online system of public consultation that allows citizens to voice their opinions on pending legislation. Over thirty million yes or no “votes” on bills have been recorded over the last decade.

The process, formalized by a 2013 resolution, opens all bills to public scrutiny. The law stipulates that “The Federal Senate website will house a mechanism that allows citizens to express their opinion on any legislative proposal” and that “any citizen, through a single registration with their personal identification data, may support or reject legislative proposals being processed in the Federal Senate.”

This type of non-representative plebiscite provides a snapshot of public opinion rather than an occasion for deliberation. Citizens are not asked to support their votes with data or evidence, and there's no opportunity for debate among those with differing opinions. While limited in its scope, the system at least offers a small way for people to participate in governance.

The aggregated voting results are public, and the E-Citizenship team regularly shares them with parliamentary offices to ensure that citizen voices reach policymakers. To be clear, Senators are not obligated to vote in line with public consultation results. Instead, the system provides lawmakers with a pulse check from among the 15 million registered participants and the 34 million public votes

Challenges and Limitations

While the Public Consultation system has successfully engaged millions, the yes/no voting format can oversimplify complex issues. There's no opportunity to provide data, evidence, or informed opinions, and citizens may vote without understanding proposed legislation. The system also risks influence from coordinated campaigns by interest groups encouraging supporters to vote one way or another. Moreover, the non-binding nature of consultations means politicians can ignore results, potentially causing citizen frustration.

Upgrading Public Consultation with AI

AI and advanced technologies could dramatically improve citizen participation in the lawmaking process, enabling Brazil to enhance its system.

Complex legislative language presents a barrier to participation. AI is already generating easy-to-understand bill summaries. Going further, AI could develop balanced explainers discussing potential impacts, pros, and cons in plain language. AI image generation could make this content more engaging through infographics or short videos, making legislation accessible to broader audiences.

AI models could simulate potential effects of proposed legislation on different demographics, regions, and sectors. Citizens could interact with these models to understand how a bill might affect them personally, their community, or the country as a whole.

A critical challenge identified by Jigsaw, Google's unit focusing on technology and human rights, is what they call the "last mile problem"—transforming citizen participation into actionable insights for institutions. They have been experimenting with using generative AI to write one-pagers with concrete takeaways about areas of agreement that could inform legislation and points of contention requiring further deliberation. Imagine if Brazil's Senate expanded beyond yes/no votes, using AI to synthesize citizen comments for Senators.

Brazil has an opportunity to redesign public consultation around more targeted questions that would generate directly useful input for lawmakers. By combining AI-powered analysis with purposeful conversation design, Brazil could create a virtuous cycle where citizen input more directly informs legislative priorities.

The e-Citizenship portal already requires registration, though voting remains anonymous. With AI, citizens could register their interests, and the system could match bill content to those interests, notifying people of pending legislation relevant to their concerns or communities. This personalized approach could increase engagement by connecting people with issues that matter to them.

For issues that transcend national boundaries—like climate change, internet governance, or global health—AI could facilitate cross-border citizen deliberation and collaboration. The system could aggregate global opinions, allowing Brazilian citizens to collaborate with counterparts in other countries on shared challenges. This acknowledges that many pressing issues require coordinated transnational responses informed by diverse global perspectives.

Through these enhancements, Brazil's already impressive citizen engagement system could become even more deliberative and impactful, setting an example for participatory democracy worldwide.

The Way Forward: Reimagining Democracy for the Digital Age

As we’ve explored the Federal Senate of Brazil's four innovative mechanisms for online citizen engagement—the Legislative Idea, the Interactive Event, the Legislative Workshop, and Public Consultation—all poised to benefit from the integration of AI to improve their efficiency and effectiveness.

Brazil's model offers valuable lessons for democracies worldwide. In an era where many nations grapple with political polarization, declining trust in institutions, and a lack of political accountability, Brazil's approach provides a roadmap for revitalizing democratic participation.

It shows that with careful design, strong institutional support, and thoughtful integration of technology, it is possible to create more participatory and responsive democratic institutions and foster the kind of informed, engaged citizenry that healthy democracies require.