What can we infer about the effect of polarized politics on the Brazilian policy-making process?We attempt to answer this question by analyzing the country's political landscape and focusing on one specific policy issue concerning agrarian policies, an area that is exposed to much ideological conflict for both the left and right wing. We show how the mechanism has worked in this case to mitigate the polarization effects. Two political groups monopolized national elections over the past two decades sharing very different positions concerning ideological preferences. In this article, we recognize polarization between the two leading parties, but argue that the Brazilian political system features the dynamics of coalitional presidentialism that mitigates party preferences. We analyze funding data for small farmers and rural settlements for the period 1995-2016, arriving at the conclusion that the agrarian policy of the competing parties resembled one another, despite political polarization.