Aborted Corporatism : The Case of Bolivia under the

In this paper, I apply theories from the literature on corporatism to Bolivia. Despite developing the necessary policies and institutions to fully incorporate labor into the political sphere, the Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (MNR) never achieved regime stability as the corporatist project was ultimately aborted for industrial labor and the miners. The primary cause of this failure was the exogenous shock of a stabilization package from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the increasing influence of United States in the Bolivian political process. When analyzing critical junctures or path dependent processes, scholars need to pay more attention to the conditions that disrupt the generation of positive feedback. Using the Bolivian case, I demonstrate how exogenous shocks in particular can impede path dependent trajectories.