Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-08
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some societies arrive at stable democratic governance while others descend into authoritarian consolidation has occupied comparative political scientists for decades. In an era marked by democratic recession across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa, revisiting the foundational theoretical frameworks that shaped our understanding of political transition carries renewed urgency. Indonesia, the world's third-largest democracy by population and the largest Muslim-majority democracy, presents a peculiarly instructive case: a nation that passed through colonial extraction, guided authoritarianism, military dictatorship, and a remarkable democratic opening, only to now face serious questions about backsliding and elite capture. The article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, revisiting Barrington Moore's analytical framework in light of the Indonesian experience, contributes to this literature at precisely the right historical moment, offering both a theoretical recalibration and an empirically grounded reflection on one of Southeast Asia's most consequential political transformations.
Barrington Moore Jr.'s 1966 masterwork, "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy," established one of the most durable arguments in comparative historical sociology: that the class configurations produced by agrarian capitalism — particularly the relative power of landlords, peasants, and the urban bourgeoisie — decisively shaped whether nations traveled toward liberal democracy, fascism, or communist revolution. His famous formulation, that there can be "no bourgeoisie, no democracy," placed the commercialized middle class at the center of democratic possibility, while warning that where landed elites retained dominance over a repressed peasantry, and where the bourgeoisie remained weak or allied with reactionary agrarian interests, the road led instead toward authoritarianism. Applying this framework to Indonesia is both productive and complicated. The Dutch colonial order produced not an independent commercial bourgeoisie with stakes in constitutional order, but rather an ethnic Chinese commercial stratum structurally subordinated to colonial authority and a priyayi Javanese administrative class loyal to the colonial state. The peasantry was integrated into export commodity production — sugar, rubber, coffee — under coercive conditions that stunted autonomous political organization. These structural inheritances help explain why post-independence Indonesia, despite its nationalist revolution, struggled to consolidate democratic institutions, and why the parliamentary democracy of the 1950s gave way first to Sukarno's Guided Democracy and then to Suharto's far more repressive New Order after the catastrophe of 1965-1966.
The New Order period (1966-1998) represents the most fully realized authoritarian outcome in Indonesian history, and Moore's analytical categories illuminate its character. Suharto's regime rested on a coalition between the military, a technocratic developmental bureaucracy, and a narrow stratum of business conglomerates — many of them ethnic Chinese tycoons bound to the regime by political dependency rather than autonomous economic power. The peasantry and agricultural labor were incorporated through corporatist institutions that depoliticized rural society while extracting resources for industrialization. Islamic civil society, represented by organizations like Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah with tens of millions of members, was politically demobilized through the forced simplification of political parties and compulsory adherence to the state ideology of Pancasila. What this period demonstrates, contra Moore's more optimistic reading of industrialization as a democratizing force, is that rapid economic growth in the context of state-led export-oriented industrialization can reinforce rather than dissolve authoritarian structures — at least until a severe external shock disrupts the underlying political economy. The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-1998, by collapsing the material basis of the New Order's legitimacy claims, produced the opening that Moore's framework might not have easily predicted: a democratization driven less by a politically assertive bourgeoisie than by an urban middle class, student movements, and a civil society that had survived beneath the surface of authoritarian control.
The Reformasi transition that began in 1998 and the subsequent two decades of democratic consolidation represent Indonesia's most significant political achievement, but they also expose the limits of Moore's framework as a teleological guide. Indonesia's democracy was not built by a bourgeoisie committed to rule of law and property rights as a class project; it was constructed by a coalition that included labor, Islamic civil society organizations, non-governmental organizations with international linkages, regional elites seeking decentralization, and elements of the military itself adjusting to a new political environment. International actors — through development assistance programs, democracy promotion initiatives, and civil society capacity-building — played a supporting, if often exaggerated, role. What Indonesian democratization illustrates is that democratic outcomes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are produced by political processes that Moore's mid-century agrarian focus cannot fully capture: the role of urban informal labor, of transnational civil society networks, of international financial institutions demanding governance reforms, and of information technology in organizing political opposition. A contemporary Moorean analysis must be expanded to incorporate these actors and structural forces, which the article under review appears to undertake by revisiting his categories in light of Indonesia's particular trajectory.
The policy implications of this kind of historically grounded structural analysis are substantial for development practitioners and democracy support organizations. Development aid directed at democratic consolidation in Indonesia and comparable cases in the Global South has often operated with an implicit modernization theory assumption: that economic growth, rising incomes, and expanded education will organically produce democratic citizens and accountable institutions. Moore's framework — and its application to Indonesia — counsels a more structural and historically attentive approach. The question is not merely whether per capita income crosses a threshold but how the political economy of development configures class relations, enables or constrains civil society organization, and shapes the interests of dominant elites with respect to democratic rules. Indonesia's current political moment, characterized by the electoral success of Prabowo Subianto, the prominent role of dynastic politics in the Widodo family's trajectory, and the growing concentration of economic and political power in an oligarchic network, suggests that democratic consolidation was shallower than the optimistic readings of the early 2000s assumed. The reemergence of military-adjacent figures in civilian politics, the weakening of independent judicial institutions, and the use of administrative and legal mechanisms to constrain civil society and media criticism all represent structural continuities that Moore's emphasis on class power and institutional legacies helps explain.
For researchers and practitioners working on civil society, ODA effectiveness, and democratic governance, the theoretical contribution of revisiting Moore through the Indonesian lens is ultimately a reminder that path dependency matters enormously. The class structures forged under colonialism, the patterns of agrarian commercialization and rural political demobilization, and the institutional inheritances of authoritarian periods do not disappear simply because elections are held. Indonesia's experience shows that formal democratization can coexist with substantive elite dominance, that civil society strength is a contingent achievement requiring sustained material and political support, and that international development assistance operates within — not above — these structural constraints. As Indonesia enters a new political period under leadership with roots in the security establishment, and as democratic recession continues globally, the scholarly work of applying classical frameworks like Moore's to contemporary Southeast Asian cases is not merely historical exercise. It is, rather, an essential contribution to the analytical toolkit that researchers, policymakers, and civil society actors need to understand what is at stake and what kinds of structural conditions must change if democratic deepening is to be more than a temporary interlude between forms of elite rule.