Latin America's political has been a recurrent theme in research on the region. This theme has been elaborated in a number of inquiries into the distinctiveness of the Latin American political style,1 and has inspired a recent suggestion that Latin America be treated as a Fourth World of Development.2 Writers arguing for a unique have defined it in various ways, but they share the notion that the experience of the region's nations fits with difficulty into more general theories of political development, and that their political processes are often fundamentally different from those in the rest of the developing world. Most recently, an emphasis on Latin American corporatism has emerged as still another approach to this theme. Not all corporatist theorists have argued in this direction, but a significant number, perhaps a majority, have stressed a Latin American corporatist tradition, sometimes rooted in the colonial past, which has produced a distinctive pattern of politics still very much alive today.3 The following is an examination of that corporatist tradition and of the value of the corporatist model, or any such unique framework, as a guide to political analysis in Latin America. The discussion to follow poses three principal arguments. The first disputes the notion of ingrained corporatism as a significant factor in Latin American development. This does not deny the more recent introduction of corporatist policies in a number of countries in the region, but instead contends that they can be explained without recourse to tradition. The imposition of a corporatist framework on the course of Latin American political development thus obscures a number of other developmental trends. For example, recent corporatist experiments in Peru and Chile and earlier developments in Mexico and Brazil are better understood as reactions to