Schneiders book is the first systematically comparative and historical analysis of the incorporation of business into politics in Latin America, examining business organizing and political activity over the last century in five of the largest, most developed countries of the region. Why did business end up better organized in Chile, Colombia, and Mexico than in Argentina and Brazil? The explanation for the surprising cross-national variations lays neither in economic characteristics of business nor broader political parameters, but in the cumulative effect of actions of state actors.

Ben Ross Schneider is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. Schneider's articles and other publications focus on a range of issues in Latin American politics and development including privatization, democratization, regional integration, corporate organization, and market-oriented reforms. He is the author of Politics within the State (1991), and co-editor of Business and the State in Developing Countries (1997, with Sylvia Maxfield) and Reinventing Leviathan (2203, with Earlene Ross Fowler). He has received fellowships and research funding from the Tinker Foundation, the Searle Foundation, the Heinz Foundation, and the Fulbright Program.

Part I. Introduction and Arguments: 1. Patterns of business politics in Latin America; 2. States and collective action; Part I. Cases and Comparisons: 3. From state to societal corporatism in Mexico; 4. From corporatism to reorganized disarticulation in Brazil; 5. Business in Columbia: well organized and well connected; 6. Consultation and contention in the making of cooperative capitalism in Chile; 7. Business associations in Argentina: fragmented and politicized; Part III. Conclusions and Implications: 8. Economic governance and varieties of capitalism; 9. Democracy and varieties of civil society; Appendices.