Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-25
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some societies democratize while others slide into authoritarianism has never lost its urgency, and in no region is that question more consequential today than Southeast Asia. Indonesia, the world's third-largest democracy by population and the largest Muslim-majority nation, presents one of the most theoretically rich and empirically contested cases in comparative political development. The decision by researchers at the Journal of Contemporary Asia to revisit Barrington Moore's foundational analytical framework in light of Indonesia's postcolonial trajectory is therefore both intellectually timely and politically significant. Moore's 1966 masterwork, "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy," offered a sweeping class-analytic account of how agrarian social structures, landlord-peasant relations, and the emergence of bourgeois commercial interests shaped whether modern nations followed democratic or authoritarian pathways. Applying that framework to Indonesia — a country that has traversed parliamentary democracy, guided autocracy, three decades of military-backed developmental authoritarianism, and a quarter-century of fragile but enduring electoral democracy — invites fundamental questions about which theoretical variables actually matter, and whether Moore's European-derived categories travel to a postcolonial, resource-dependent archipelagic state.
Moore's central analytical claim, summarized in his much-cited formulation that "no bourgeoisie, no democracy," rested on the proposition that the emergence of an independent commercial and industrial class capable of challenging landed aristocratic power was the sine qua non of liberal democratic development. Where landlords successfully subordinated the peasantry to labor-repressive agricultural systems — as in Prussia or Japan — authoritarian or fascist outcomes were more likely. Where peasants retained sufficient autonomy or organized collective resistance — as in revolutionary China — communist outcomes became possible. For Indonesia, these categories require substantial recalibration. Dutch colonial rule organized the agrarian economy primarily around plantation export agriculture on Java and the outer islands, creating a hybrid structure in which a quasi-feudal landlord class was largely absent in the European sense, yet colonial capital performed analogous functions of labor extraction and surplus appropriation. The nationalist bourgeoisie that emerged in the early twentieth century was relatively thin, ethnically complex, and deeply entangled with the anticolonial project rather than with domestic capital accumulation in the Moorean sense. This structural peculiarity goes a long way toward explaining why Indonesia's post-independence democracy was fragile from the outset, why Sukarno's Guided Democracy represented less a betrayal of liberal norms than a recognition of the institutional vacuum beneath formal constitutional arrangements, and why the military — as an organizational force with its own economic interests and developmental ideology — emerged as the decisive actor shaping regime outcomes in ways Moore's framework only partially anticipates.
The Suharto New Order (1966–1998) constitutes the gravitational center of any Moorean analysis of Indonesia. What the New Order achieved was not merely political repression but a comprehensive reorganization of the class structure in ways that deferred rather than precluded democratization. Export-led growth, foreign direct investment, green revolution agricultural policies, and the systematic co-optation of functional groups — including labor, business associations, and rural organizations — created a developmental coalition that suppressed horizontal class conflict while generating extraordinary GDP growth across the 1970s and 1980s. This is precisely the kind of capitalist modernization without democratic politics that Moore identified as characteristic of certain authoritarian developmental trajectories. Yet the New Order also inadvertently created the social preconditions for its own eventual undoing. Urbanization, mass education, an expanding professional middle class, and the growth of an ethnically Chinese commercial bourgeoisie with interests in rule-based economic governance all built constituencies whose patience with Suharto's patrimonial excesses eroded over time. When the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98 shattered the developmental legitimacy that had substituted for political accountability, the class coalition sustaining the New Order collapsed with remarkable speed, producing the Reformasi transition that Moore's framework would broadly predict — commercial and professional classes withdrawing support from authoritarian rulers when the economic bargain collapses.
The post-Reformasi period since 1998 tests whether Indonesian democracy has developed the institutional and sociological depth to become self-sustaining, or whether it represents a contingent outcome vulnerable to reversal. The scholarly consensus has grown more pessimistic in recent years. Decentralization transferred rent-extraction opportunities to regional elites rather than empowering civil society. Political parties became vehicles for patronage distribution rather than programmatic competition. The military retained substantial economic and political influence even after formal withdrawal from legislative representation. Civil society organizations that were vibrant in the early Reformasi period found themselves squeezed between government pressure and the organizational capabilities of conservative religious movements. The elections of 2014 and 2019 under Joko Widodo demonstrated that competitive electoral democracy could persist alongside informal authoritarianism — a combination that scholars have variously labeled "illiberal democracy," "competitive authoritarianism," or "democratic regression." The 2024 electoral victory of Prabowo Subianto, a former military general with documented human rights liabilities from the New Order era, raises the question Moore's framework ultimately poses most sharply: is Indonesian democracy the product of durable structural transformations in class relations, or a contingent arrangement sustained only as long as powerful actors find it instrumentally convenient?
The theoretical and policy implications of applying Moore's framework to Indonesia extend well beyond the Indonesian case. For scholars of comparative politics, this article contributes to a growing literature that takes structural and historical sociology seriously as a corrective to the transitology paradigm that dominated democracy studies in the 1990s. Transitology's focus on elite pacts, institutional design, and the strategic calculations of political actors provided important micro-level insights but systematically underweighted the agrarian, class, and colonial histories that Moore placed at the center of his analysis. For development practitioners working in the ODA space, the Moorean reading of Indonesia underscores a warning that has been insufficiently heeded: economic growth under authoritarian or semi-authoritarian conditions does not automatically generate the social classes and civic capacities that sustain democracy. Donor investments in governance reform, civil society capacity, and rule-of-law institutions are not simply supplements to economic development programs — they are substitutes for historical processes of bourgeois class formation that never fully occurred in many postcolonial states. The international community's tendency to treat Indonesia as a democratic success story, particularly useful as a counter-narrative to the China model of authoritarian development, has at times obscured the precariousness of democratic institutions and the structural vulnerabilities that a rigorous Moorean analysis would foreground. Research that recovers that critical edge, placing Indonesia's democratic trajectory back within the long arc of its colonial political economy and class formation, performs a valuable service both for area studies scholarship and for the broader comparative project of understanding when and why democracy endures.