Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-04
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of how societies arrive at democratic governance — or fail to — has animated comparative politics for decades, yet the puzzle has gained renewed urgency as liberal democratic norms face pressure across the developing world. Indonesia, the world's third-largest democracy and Southeast Asia's most populous nation, represents one of the most consequential and intellectually demanding cases in this literature. Once celebrated as a democratic success story following the collapse of Suharto's authoritarian New Order in 1998, Indonesia has since exhibited persistent tensions between democratic consolidation and authoritarian regression, making it a compelling site for revisiting foundational theories of political development. The publication of this article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia signals a broader scholarly reinvestment in structural, historically grounded approaches to understanding why some states democratize and others do not — a question with immediate implications for development practitioners, aid donors, and civil society actors working across the Global South.
Barrington Moore Jr.'s 1966 masterwork, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, advanced a structural argument that remains controversial and generative in equal measure. Moore contended that the character of agrarian class relations during the transition to commercial agriculture largely determined whether a society would follow the path of bourgeois democracy, fascist authoritarianism, or communist revolution. The presence of a landed aristocracy aligned with a weak bourgeoisie and an exploited peasantry tended to produce fascism; where the bourgeoisie succeeded in breaking the power of the aristocracy through revolution, democracy was more likely to emerge; where the peasantry itself became the driving revolutionary force, communist outcomes followed. Applying this framework to Indonesia requires confronting significant analytical challenges, given the archipelago's colonial history under Dutch rule, the relative weakness of an indigenous capitalist class prior to independence, and the ways in which the postcolonial state became the central arbiter of economic power. Yet the effort is analytically productive precisely because it forces scholars to specify which class actors matter, under what conditions, and with what consequences — rather than treating Indonesia's democratic trajectory as the outcome of elite bargaining or institutional design alone.
Indonesia's political history offers multiple junctures through which Moore's analytical lenses can be refracted. The parliamentary democracy of the early 1950s gave way to Sukarno's Guided Democracy in 1957, itself displaced by the mass violence of 1965–66 and the subsequent consolidation of Suharto's developmentalist authoritarianism. The New Order represented a distinctive variant of what scholars of comparative authoritarianism have called "bureaucratic-military capitalism," in which state institutions, the military, and a crony capitalist class became so intertwined that civil society organizations, independent trade unions, and political parties were systematically hollowed out. When this regime collapsed under the weight of the Asian financial crisis in 1998, the resulting Reformasi opened space for competitive elections, decentralization, and the resurgence of civil society — but it did so under conditions in which the structural preconditions Moore associated with durable democracy remained weakly developed. Oligarchic capital, rooted in networks built during the New Order, adapted rather than dissolved. This dynamic — democratic transition without structural transformation of elite power — has shaped Indonesia's subsequent democratic trajectory in ways that structural analysis illuminates more clearly than institutional or procedural accounts alone.
The implications of this line of argument extend well beyond Indonesian studies. Across Southeast Asia, states that underwent nominally democratic transitions in the post-Cold War period have demonstrated varying degrees of resilience in the face of authoritarian pressure, populist disruption, or outright military intervention. Thailand's repeated coups, Myanmar's catastrophic military seizure of power in 2021, and the Philippines' oscillation between reformist and strongman politics all raise the question of whether transitions rooted in elite negotiation rather than deeper social transformation generate durable democratic norms. For development agencies and ODA frameworks, these patterns carry a sobering lesson: investments in democratic institutions — electoral commissions, constitutional courts, anti-corruption bodies — may be insufficient if the structural conditions enabling genuine political competition, including organized labor, independent media, and a diversified private sector not captured by oligarchic interests, remain absent. The structural tradition Moore inaugurated insists that institutions are downstream of social forces, and that ignoring those forces in favor of technical assistance produces fragile rather than resilient democratic outcomes.
For scholars and practitioners invested in the future of democracy in the Global South, a Moorean rereading of Indonesia also raises important questions about the relationship between civil society and structural change. Indonesia's civil society organizations have been among the region's most dynamic, playing crucial roles in electoral monitoring, anti-corruption advocacy, and policy reform. Yet civil society operates within structural constraints it rarely has the power to transform on its own. Where oligarchic capital retains decisive influence over media, political party financing, and regulatory institutions, even vigorous civil society activism tends to produce incremental rather than structural change. This does not counsel pessimism — Indonesia's democratic institutions have proved more resilient than many observers feared — but it does suggest that research agendas and funding strategies that focus narrowly on civil society capacity without attending to the structural context in which that capacity is exercised will produce incomplete diagnoses and suboptimal interventions. The enduring value of returning to Barrington Moore in this context is precisely that it reorients attention toward the deep structural conditions that shape what democratic politics can and cannot achieve, a corrective that remains essential as Indonesia and its neighbors navigate an increasingly turbulent global political environment.