Analysis of the Benches in the Chamber of Deputies

The graphic available in the link below comes from an article by the Investigative Reporting and Journalism Agency, whose authors are Étore Medeiros and Bruno Fonseca. The article can be found at the link: “The Chamber Benches”, on February 18, 2016.

The file with the information can be accessed by anyone, however, it is in CSV format, and will have to be reconfigured for reading by graphic production systems.

Our work was to extract the information from the csv file, change it to adapt it to graphical analysis tools, remodeling it for this presentation.

“According to the authors, federal deputies from the Agricultural Parliamentary Front (FPA), one of the largest and most organized groups in the Chamber of Deputies, meet weekly during lunch in a mansion in Lago Sul, an upscale neighborhood of Brasília. Also released in advance to the press, the “menu” – the name given by the FPA's own advisors to the topics that will be debated – on Tuesday (16) included the taxation of agricultural products, the compensation of properties when expropriated and the indication of members for the permanent committees of the Chamber of Deputies, whose composition is renewed each year. In addition to the Agriculture board, ruralists are paying particular attention to two others: the Constitution, Justice and Citizenship (CCJ) and the Environment.

“We are going to try to get as many people as possible to debate the environmental issue in Brazil, not in an ideological or radical way, but in a balanced way. Let’s try, yes, to have a large majority”, he told Public, after lunch, federal deputy Nilson Leitão (PSDB-MT). Vice-president of the FPA, he is the Reporter of the CPI of Funai and Incra, that intends to raid federal agencies, and presided over the Commission that in 2015 approved PEC 215 – which includes the National Congress in the process of demarcating indigenous lands. “We won on the Commission; now it's time to try to put Soon in plenary, see what the Chamber will decide and ensure that the Senate can also speed up the process”, he says, about PEC 215, whose definitive approval is one of the main objectives of the front for 2016 – no matter how taxed it is by many jurists like unconstitutional.

In addition to the FPA, several other benches operate daily in the National Congress, bringing together deputies with similar ideologies, motivations or objectives, or even with financiers from the same sector. The operating dynamics of these thematic sets are heterogeneous. Not all of them have a structure or strategy similar to the ruralists – who have coordinators, agitators and negotiators among their members – and in many cases the formation of the bench only becomes clear with the development of specific agendas or with the help of data from Donation campaign.

To show which parliamentarians defend which interests, the Public raised the composition of eleven of the most active benches. In addition to the ruralists, who have 207 deputies, we mapped other giants in the Chamber: the evangelical (196), the business (208), the contractors and construction companies (226) and the relatives (238), the largest grouping in the House – confirming the trend of increasing the number of deputies with political family members.”

Analyzing the files, I came across several technical inconsistencies, which, to be honest, are sometimes difficult to notice or verify.

Therefore, the graph, in fact, is just a graphic sampling of the data already publicly available on the aforementioned website and in the annals of the Chamber of Deputies

Chart analyzing the participation of parliamentarians on the Benches of the Chamber of Deputies