  Conflicts between the executive and legislative powers are a common, and even
expected, characteristic of presidential systems, with some governments being
more successful in the activity of obtaining support from the Congress than
others. In the case of Brazil, specifically, this factor is considered crucial
in the so called "coalition governments", with direct positive or negative
consequences for the president, in terms of government performance during his
(her) term. In this work, we investigate this problem by testing and comparing
two different methods for evaluating the government support in the Brazilian
House of Representatives. The first method is a more traditional one, being
based on roll-call voting data, and measures the presidential support at the
legislators level. The second method uses a network-based approach, and
performs the same type of analysis but at the parties level. The obtained
results, when applying both methods on legislative data comprising the period
from 1998 until 2019, indicate that both methods are valid, with common
features being found not only between the results provided by the two of them,
but also when comparing their results with those obtained by previous and
relevant studies in this field, by using the same type of data but different
methodologies.
