Who makes policies? A long tradition attributes policy outcomes to executives, downplaying the importance of legislatures in the process. In this article, we present a novel concept on legislatures' political positions as key to defining more or less favorable political environments within which policies are adopted. Empirically, we propose novel measures of legislatures' positions aggregating party-level measurements for 3,467 parties represented in 178 lower chambers between 1970 and 2019 on four key dimensions: economy, exclusion, religion, and democracy. Connecting these with eleven policy outcomes, we show that they are not only significant predictors of welfare universalism, anti-immigration, LGBT inclusion, and climate change policies but also that they outperform the governments' stances as an explanatory factor. This is valid across democracies and autocracies alike for most outcomes, yet legislatures in democratic regimes are better in passing policies compared to democratic governments and autocratic institutions. Furthermore, we also find that electoral design (i.e., majoritarian, proportional, or mixed) and electoral thresholds mediate several effects, while the differences between presidential and parliamentary systems is not influential. These results provide evidence for a broader approach to public policy that incorporates legislatures’ positions.