Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-09
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some societies slide into authoritarianism while others consolidate democratic governance has preoccupied comparative political scientists for generations. In the contemporary moment, that question carries renewed urgency. Across Southeast Asia, the democratic gains of the late twentieth century are under visible strain: electoral manipulation, the erosion of judicial independence, and the cultivation of personalist power have become recurring features of the regional political landscape. Against this backdrop, revisiting Barrington Moore's foundational comparative-historical framework — as the article under review does with respect to Indonesia — is not an exercise in intellectual nostalgia but a genuinely productive analytical move. Moore's 1966 work, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, proposed that the long-run trajectory of political regimes could be traced back to the agrarian class structures of the early modern period, and specifically to the alliances or conflicts among landlords, the bourgeoisie, and the peasantry as societies navigated commercialization and industrialization. Applying that lens to Indonesia allows researchers to ask whether the country's mid-twentieth-century slide into authoritarian developmentalism and its later — and fitful — democratization can be explained by structural factors rooted in colonial political economy, or whether contingency and agency played decisive roles that Moore's deterministic framework underweights.
Indonesia is, by most measures, the most consequential democratic experiment in Southeast Asia and arguably one of the most significant in the developing world. With a population exceeding 270 million, extraordinary ethnic and religious diversity, and a geography that stretches across more than seventeen thousand islands, the country represents a stress test for democratic institutions that few other polities can match. The New Order regime of Suharto, which governed from 1966 to 1998, was a paradigmatic case of authoritarian developmentalism: formal political participation was tightly constrained, the military was embedded in civilian administration through the dwifungsi doctrine, and a patronage-based political economy funneled resources through family networks and loyal conglomerates. The structural conditions that enabled this configuration — a peasantry politically demobilized by the violence of 1965 and 1966, a domestic bourgeoisie subordinated to state capital and military-linked business groups, and a landed elite whose interests had been partially reorganized through Green Revolution-era agricultural policy — are precisely the kinds of variables that a Moorean analysis foregrounds. The article's contribution, as signaled in its title, lies in tracing the specific pathways through which those structural conditions shaped both the consolidation of dictatorship under Suharto and the conditions under which that dictatorship eventually became unsustainable.
The moment of Reformasi in 1998, when mass protests and elite fractures combined to force Suharto's resignation, initiated what became one of the more celebrated cases of democratic transition in the developing world. Within a decade, Indonesia had held multiple rounds of free elections, decentralized significant power to regional governments, reformed its military's formal political role, and built a reasonably competitive party system. Democratization theorists pointed to Indonesia as evidence against arguments — sometimes associated with simplified readings of Moore himself — that Muslim-majority societies were structurally inhospitable to liberal democracy. By the 2010s, however, the optimism had become more qualified. The decentralization process, while expanding political participation, also empowered local oligarchs and gave rise to a fragmented patronage landscape. National-level politics remained dominated by elite coalitions in which programmatic policy platforms played a secondary role to resource distribution and identity mobilization. The Joko Widodo presidency (2014–2024), initially heralded as a break with the elite political class, gradually revealed the limits of reformist leadership within a system in which structural power remained concentrated in oligarchic hands. The election in 2024 of Prabowo Subianto — a former special forces commander with documented human rights controversies from the Suharto era — as president underscored the degree to which Indonesia's democratic consolidation remained incomplete and contested. A Moorean framework, updated to account for the specific character of post-colonial capitalist development and the role of the military as a political actor, offers useful tools for understanding why structural power has proven so resistant to democratic reform.
From the perspective of ODA and development policy, the Indonesian case carries important implications that extend well beyond the country's borders. Much of the international development community's engagement with democratic governance in the post-Cold War period was premised on a broadly liberal institutionalist framework: build the right formal institutions, support civil society, hold elections, and democratic consolidation would follow. Indonesia's experience suggests that this framework systematically underestimates the degree to which informal power structures — oligarchic business networks, patronage hierarchies, the residual political influence of coercive institutions — can capture or hollow out formal democratic mechanisms without dismantling them entirely. This has implications for how development agencies design governance programming. Support for electoral administration matters, but it is insufficient if the electoral arena is effectively pre-structured by oligarchic resource advantages. Civil society strengthening is valuable, but civil society organizations in contexts like Indonesia operate within a political economy that shapes their capacity to translate social pressure into policy change. The Moorean insight that class structure conditions political outcomes suggests that development interventions oriented purely at the institutional surface of democracy are unlikely to produce durable results without accompanying attention to the distribution of economic power.
The broader regional and global dimensions of this analysis deserve emphasis. Indonesia's ambiguous democratic trajectory is part of a wider pattern of what scholars have variously termed democratic backsliding, competitive authoritarianism, or illiberal democracy across middle-income countries that completed formal transitions in the 1980s and 1990s. Thailand, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and — in different regional contexts — Hungary, Turkey, and Brazil all exhibit features of this pattern: formal democratic institutions persist alongside practices that systematically advantage incumbents and undermine accountability. Moore's framework, developed to explain the divergent paths of England, France, the United States, Germany, Japan, Russia, and China, was not designed with these post-colonial, post-transition cases in mind. Adapting it to Indonesia requires both theoretical flexibility and empirical precision. The article under review, by engaging seriously with Moore's categories — the character of agrarian capitalism, the autonomy of the bourgeoisie, the political role of the peasantry — while remaining attentive to the specific historical conditions of Dutch colonialism, the independence struggle, and the post-1965 political settlement, models a kind of comparative-historical analysis that is rigorous without being mechanically determinist.
For practitioners and researchers engaged with questions of democratic governance, civil society, and political economy in the Global South, this work points toward a set of forward-looking questions that deserve sustained attention. First, how does the changing composition of the Indonesian middle class — increasingly urban, educated, and connected to global circuits of capital and information — alter the structural conditions that Moore identified as central to democratic possibility? Second, what role does the formalization of Islamic civil society and the politicization of religious identity play in reconfiguring the class alliances that underlie regime type? Third, as digital platforms transform the information environment in which political mobilization occurs, do Moorean structural analyses need to be supplemented by accounts of how information asymmetries and surveillance capacities modify the balance of power between states and citizens? Indonesia will remain a critical case for anyone who cares about the prospects of democracy in the twenty-first century. The analytical tradition that Barrington Moore inaugurated — comparative, structural, historically grounded — remains among the most productive frameworks for approaching that case, not because it provides answers, but because it asks the right questions.