Legislative studies emphasize greatly the result that governments get to approve or not their agenda. In this article I propose a new way of understanding legislative success. More than the result itself, I argue that governments care about the repercussions about what they do to the electorate. After classifying the way legislative results were obtained in the Legislative Assemblies of Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul from 1999 to 2006, I analyze potential factors that explain the variation in the level of positive-sum outcomes identified in each legislature. I focus particularly on the composition and size of government coalitions in the two states. My main finding is that the more coalescing of a coalition government, the smaller tends to be the volume of positive-sum outcomes. The premise for understanding this result is that the more distant are the preferences of the executive and the party with which they are negotiating, the greater tends to be trading for positions in exchange for approval of the policy preferred by the government. It seems plausible, therefore, that the distribution of positions in departments coalescing only happens when the parties in negotiation do not agree with the proposed agenda. In this context, thus, decisions with lower degree of consensus among actors in competition will be sent by the Executive to the Legislative proceedings. Thus, it is expected that positive-sum decisions to be less recurrent.
State legislatures; State executives; Legislative success; Government coalitions; Coalition presidentialism; positive-sum
