Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-10
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of what makes democracies endure — and what causes them to collapse — has returned with renewed urgency to the center of comparative political analysis. Across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa, the optimism that followed the so-called "third wave" of democratization has been tempered by the persistence of competitive authoritarianism, the erosion of institutional checks, and the capture of formally democratic procedures by entrenched elites. Against this backdrop, revisiting Barrington Moore Jr.'s foundational framework of social origins of political regimes is not merely an exercise in intellectual history. It is an attempt to recover analytical tools adequate to a moment when the boundaries between dictatorship and democracy have become genuinely blurred. Indonesia, as Asia's largest democracy and one of the most consequential post-authoritarian transitions of the late twentieth century, offers a particularly rich site for testing, revising, and extending Moore's insights. The Journal of Contemporary Asia article under consideration engages precisely this challenge: to read Indonesia's political trajectory through a Mooreian lens and to ask what that reading reveals about the structural conditions that produce durable democracy or its alternatives.
Barrington Moore's 1966 work, "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy," proposed that the path a society takes toward modern political order is fundamentally determined by the character of agrarian class relations and the coalitions formed during the transition from agrarian to industrial economy. His famous aphorism — "No bourgeoisie, no democracy" — captured the argument that where a commercialized agrarian bourgeoisie capable of wresting concessions from the crown did not exist, the conditions for liberal democracy were absent. Instead, societies faced either the fascist route, in which landed elites and industrial capital allied to suppress a politically mobilized but organizationally weak peasantry, or the communist route, in which peasant revolution from below overthrew the old agrarian order entirely. Applied to the decolonizing world, Moore's framework raised uncomfortable questions about the structural prerequisites for self-sustaining democratic governance — questions that retain considerable force in contexts where formal democratization has proceeded without the class transformations Moore regarded as foundational. The article's contribution lies in systematically tracing how Indonesia's particular configuration of colonial agrarian structures, postcolonial state formation, and elite political economy mapped onto, diverged from, and complicated Moore's typology.
Indonesia's twentieth-century political history does not fit neatly into any of Moore's three paths, and that very untidiness is analytically instructive. The Dutch colonial system, particularly the cultivation system of the nineteenth century, produced a distinctive agrarian order characterized by neither a strong indigenous landlord class capable of independent political organization nor a peasantry driven to sustained revolutionary mobilization in the Moorean sense. The nationalist movement that brought independence in 1945 was led predominantly by an urban intelligentsia and administrative elite whose social base was far removed from the agrarian economy that still employed the overwhelming majority of the population. Sukarno's "Guided Democracy" of the late 1950s and early 1960s represented one response to this structural mismatch — an attempt to construct a political formula adequate to a society with weak bourgeois institutions but powerful mobilizational forces in the form of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and its peasant associations. The catastrophic collapse of this experiment in 1965-1966, resulting in the mass killings of alleged communists and the installation of Suharto's New Order, can be read through Moore as the brutal resolution of an unstable intermediate configuration: a military-bureaucratic elite allied with rural notables and urban capital to extinguish the one genuinely mass-based agrarian political force in the country. The New Order that followed was not fascism in Moore's European sense, but it deployed analogous structural logic — demobilizing the peasantry, incorporating business elites into a patronage network under state supervision, and using formal electoral institutions as legitimating facades for authoritarian consolidation.
The Reformasi transition of 1998 and its aftermath constitute the most difficult terrain for any Mooreian analysis of Indonesia, and this is where the article's engagement with the framework becomes most generative. Moore was generally skeptical that democracy imposed or negotiated from above — rather than won through sustained bourgeois or popular struggle — would produce institutions capable of defending themselves against authoritarian reversal. Indonesia's post-1998 democratization was, in important respects, a transition managed by elites who had been socialized within the New Order system. The dissolution of Suharto's personal rule opened space for competitive electoral politics, decentralization, and a substantially freer civil society, but it did not dismantle the underlying structures of oligarchic economic power or the political influence of the military. Scholars like Jeffrey Winters have argued that Indonesian democracy is best understood as an oligarchic democracy — a system in which competitive elections coexist with the continued dominance of a small number of extraordinarily wealthy individuals who use their resources to shape political outcomes across party lines. This characterization is deeply consonant with Moore's concern that formal democratic institutions without the appropriate class substrate remain vulnerable to capture. The broader regional context reinforces this reading: across Southeast Asia, from the Philippines to Thailand to Myanmar, post-authoritarian transitions have repeatedly produced hybrid regimes in which democratic procedures serve as instruments for elite reproduction rather than mechanisms for popular accountability.
The policy implications of this analysis are significant for international development actors, ODA practitioners, and civil society organizations engaged in democracy support programming. If the article's Mooreian reading is correct, then democracy promotion strategies that focus primarily on institutional design — electoral systems, constitutional provisions, anti-corruption agencies — without attending to the underlying structures of agrarian and industrial class power are likely to produce fragile results. Indonesia's recent political trajectory under President Prabowo Subianto, who assumed office in 2024 with deep roots in the New Order military establishment, illustrates the ongoing salience of these structural factors. Prabowo's electoral success was not achieved through overt authoritarian reversal but through the workings of a political economy in which oligarchic networks, media concentration, and the residual organizational capacities of the old military establishment continue to shape the effective range of political competition. For development institutions and bilateral donors committed to supporting democratic governance in the Indo-Pacific, this suggests the need for programming that reaches beyond elite-level institution building to engage the organizational capacities of labor movements, peasant associations, and urban civil society formations — precisely the kinds of actors whose relative strength or weakness Moore identified as structurally determinative. The challenge, as always, is that such programming is politically contentious in ways that institutional design assistance is not.
Looking forward, Indonesia's democratic trajectory will be shaped by forces that Moore could not have anticipated but that his framework helps to illuminate. The consolidation of digital political economy — in which platform capitalism concentrates informational and organizational resources in the hands of a small number of actors — reproduces at a new technological register the structural concentrations of power that Moore identified as inimical to durable democracy. The growth of Indonesia's urban middle class, often cited as a potential bourgeois democratic constituency in the Mooreian sense, has not yet produced the kind of autonomous political organization that Moore regarded as necessary; middle-class political behavior in Indonesia has tended toward volatility rather than sustained institutional investment. At the same time, Indonesia's civil society remains substantially more robust than those of many regional neighbors, and its history of sustained popular mobilization — from the 1998 Reformasi movement to more recent protests against legislative rollbacks — suggests that the social resources for democratic defense are not absent. For researchers in comparative politics and development studies, the article's contribution is to insist that understanding these dynamics requires returning to structural questions about class, agrarian order, and elite coalition that have sometimes been eclipsed by more institutionalist or culturalist approaches. The pathways to dictatorship and democracy, Moore argued, are not accidents of leadership or ideology but products of deep social configurations. Indonesia's ongoing democratic experiment, with all its contradictions and vulnerabilities, continues to provide some of the most important evidence about whether and how those configurations can be transformed.