Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-06
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some societies transition toward democracy while others consolidate authoritarian rule remains among the most consequential in comparative political science. In an era marked by democratic backsliding across Southeast Asia — from Myanmar's 2021 coup to the erosion of electoral integrity in the Philippines and Thailand — the return to foundational theoretical frameworks is not merely an academic exercise. It is a practical necessity for scholars, policymakers, and development practitioners seeking to understand the structural conditions that make democratic consolidation possible or precarious. A recent article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia revisits Barrington Moore's landmark comparative-historical framework and applies it systematically to Indonesia, the world's third-largest democracy and a case that has long occupied an ambiguous position in theories of regime change. This engagement is timely. Indonesia's 2024 presidential election, which brought Prabowo Subianto — a former military general with a contested human rights record — to power in a democratic vote, raises urgent questions about whether democracy in Indonesia is a durable institutional achievement or a contingent equilibrium vulnerable to reversal.
Barrington Moore's 1966 work, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, argued that the pathway a society takes toward a modern political order is determined largely by the class coalitions forged during the transition from agrarian to industrial capitalism. Moore identified three broad routes: the bourgeois-democratic path associated with England and France, the fascist path associated with Germany and Japan, where a weak bourgeoisie allied with a landed aristocracy against labor, and the communist path associated with China and Russia, where a revolutionary peasantry filled the political vacuum left by absent or destroyed upper classes. The analytical core of Moore's argument rested on the relationship between landed elites, the commercial bourgeoisie, and the peasantry — and critically, on whether agrarian capitalism was developed through market commercialization or through labor-repressive plantation systems. Applying this framework to Indonesia compels scholars to grapple with the colonial legacy of the Dutch cultivation system, which imposed cash-crop extraction through coercive peasant labor rather than market incentives. This labor-repressive agrarian structure, Moore's theory would predict, stunted the development of an autonomous bourgeoisie and created social conditions more conducive to authoritarian than democratic outcomes — a prediction that appears broadly consistent with Suharto's New Order, which governed Indonesia from 1966 to 1998 under a developmentalist military authoritarianism undergirded by rural patronage networks and the suppression of independent civil society.
Yet Indonesia's transition following the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis and the fall of Suharto complicates any straightforward application of Moore's framework. The Reformasi period inaugurated a sequence of democratic elections, decentralization of political power, and the institutional consolidation of civil liberties that defied structural predictions rooted in colonial agrarian history. This is where contemporary scholarship adds genuine analytical value: by interrogating how Indonesia's specific configuration of class forces, urban middle-class activism, Islamic civil society organizations such as Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, and a fractured military establishment produced a democratic opening that Moore's original framework did not anticipate for societies with Indonesia's structural characteristics. The article's engagement with this tension — between the determinism implicit in structural-historical analysis and the contingency visible in Indonesia's actual trajectory — places it within a rich secondary literature on "third wave" democratization that includes Huntington, O'Donnell, and more recent work by Slater, Pepinsky, and Mietzner on Southeast Asian democratic dynamics. The theoretical contribution lies in using Indonesia as a stress test for Moore, identifying where the framework's predictive power holds and where historical agency, conjunctural crises, and organizational factors introduce irreducible contingency.
For development practitioners and ODA policy communities, the implications are substantial. Indonesia has long been a showcase case for international democracy promotion, receiving significant bilateral and multilateral support for electoral management, civil society capacity building, rule of law reform, and anti-corruption institutions through agencies such as USAID, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the European Union. If the structural-historical reading derived from Moore suggests that Indonesia's democratic institutions rest on a relatively thin class foundation — lacking the dense commercial bourgeoisie that anchored Northwestern European democracy — then external support for procedural democracy must be complemented by sustained investment in the socioeconomic conditions that make democratic citizenship substantively meaningful. This means attending not only to elections and legislatures but to land tenure reform, labor rights, financial inclusion, and the organizational capacity of rural and urban civil society. The article's implicit argument, that regime type is not simply a function of elite decisions or institutional design but of deeper class structures and their transformations, should recalibrate how donors think about the sequencing and targeting of governance assistance in middle-income democracies.
Looking forward, Indonesia's current political moment invites cautious but engaged attention from researchers and practitioners alike. The election of Prabowo with a landslide majority, combined with the effective consolidation of a coalition encompassing most major parties, raises questions about the future of loyal opposition, press freedom, and the independence of horizontal accountability institutions such as the Corruption Eradication Commission. These are questions Moore's framework cannot answer directly, but the framework provides essential context: whether Indonesia's democratic institutions will prove resilient depends in part on whether the socioeconomic changes of the past three decades — urbanization, expansion of the service and manufacturing middle class, the spread of digital civil society — have created class constituencies with a genuine and organized stake in democratic governance. Future research applying and refining Moore's analytical categories in the Indonesian context will need to engage seriously with the role of Islamic organizations as para-political actors, with the politics of oligarchic capital that spans both democratic and authoritarian periods, and with the subnational variation that decentralization has introduced into Indonesian political economy. The scholarly conversation this article contributes to is not merely retrospective. It is a vital analytical resource for anyone working to understand whether the democratic gains of the Reformasi era can be sustained, deepened, and defended in a rapidly changing regional and global environment.