Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-12
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some societies become enduring democracies while others remain trapped in cycles of authoritarianism has occupied comparative political scientists for decades, yet it acquires renewed urgency in the current moment. Across Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Latin America, democratic institutions erected in the final decades of the twentieth century are exhibiting signs of stress — eroding from within through executive aggrandizement, judicial capture, and the manipulation of electoral processes rather than through the blunt instrument of military coups. In this environment, returning to foundational frameworks of comparative historical sociology is not an exercise in academic nostalgia but a genuinely productive analytical strategy. The publication of this article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, applying Barrington Moore's enduring framework to the Indonesian case, arrives at a moment when Indonesia's own democratic trajectory is once again the subject of serious scrutiny, making the intervention both timely and politically consequential.
Barrington Moore's 1966 magnum opus, "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World," advanced a structural-historical thesis about the class conditions underpinning divergent political outcomes in the transition to modernity. For Moore, the crucial determinants lay not in political culture or elite intentions but in the configuration of agrarian class relations and the relative power of the bourgeoisie, the landed aristocracy, and the peasantry at the moment of modernization. His celebrated formulation — "no bourgeoisie, no democracy" — pointed to the critical role of a commercially independent middle class capable of challenging both aristocratic power and royal prerogative. Where the bourgeoisie allied itself with a modernizing state against a labor-repressive landed class, fascism or authoritarian developmentalism tended to emerge. Where peasant rebellion drove the revolutionary impulse without a capable bourgeois vanguard, communist outcomes followed. Applying this tripartite schema to postcolonial states in Asia requires both fidelity to Moore's structural logic and sensitivity to the profound differences introduced by colonialism, late development, and the Cold War geopolitical order — differences that the Indonesian case illuminates with unusual clarity.
Indonesia presents one of the most complex and instructive cases in the comparative study of authoritarian consolidation and democratic transition in the postcolonial world. The Dutch colonial political economy shaped Indonesian agrarian class relations in ways that would prove consequential for the post-independence political order: plantation agriculture concentrated in Sumatra and Java generated export surpluses that enriched colonial capital while systematically suppressing the formation of an indigenous bourgeoisie capable of autonomous political action. The result was an independence movement led primarily by the nationalist intelligentsia and the nascent state bureaucracy rather than by a propertied class with an independent economic base — a structural condition that would haunt Indonesian politics for decades. Sukarno's Guided Democracy from 1957 onward and the subsequent catastrophe of 1965, in which the military and affiliated groups killed between five hundred thousand and one million suspected communists and leftists, represent precisely the kind of violent resolution of agrarian class conflict that Moore identified as a precondition for authoritarian consolidation rather than democratic development. Suharto's New Order (1966–1998), built upon the destruction of the PKI's mass peasant base and the subordination of organized labor, fits disturbingly well within Moore's pathway toward what he called "revolution from above" — state-directed modernization that achieves economic growth while foreclosing the political mobilization of subordinate classes.
The democratic transition that followed the 1998 Reformasi movement and Suharto's fall complicates and enriches the Moorean framework in instructive ways, however. Moore's classical schema did not easily anticipate the mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes facing acute legitimacy crises — in Indonesia's case precipitated by the Asian financial crisis — might negotiate managed transitions to electoral democracy without the prior maturation of a strong independent bourgeoisie. Indonesia's transition was driven by a coalition of students, urban middle-class professionals, dissident military factions, and internationally connected civil society organizations, none of whom quite mapped onto Moore's class categories in their pure form. What scholars have subsequently called "elite-driven democratization" characterized the Indonesian case: political liberalization was secured without fundamental redistribution of economic power, leaving the oligarchic networks that had flourished under the New Order largely intact, now operating through competitive electoral politics rather than through a single authoritarian patron. This structural residue is critical for understanding what the broader regional and global literature has increasingly characterized as Indonesia's "democratic recession" — a gradual erosion of civil liberties, press freedom, and judicial independence visible in longitudinal indices from Freedom House and V-Dem, a trend that accelerated particularly in the latter years of Joko Widodo's administration and has continued with the election of Prabowo Subianto to the presidency in 2024.
The policy and research implications of revisiting Moore's framework through the Indonesian lens extend well beyond the bilateral case. For scholars of comparative democratization, the Indonesian trajectory offers a powerful reminder that third-wave democratic transitions which bypass the structural transformation of agrarian and oligarchic class relations are likely to produce what might be called "low-quality democracies" — polities that sustain formal electoral competition while permitting the reproduction of concentrated economic power and the systematic suppression of organized labor, independent media, and autonomous civil society. This is not merely an academic observation: international development institutions, bilateral donors, and civil society support mechanisms operating across the Indo-Pacific have invested substantially in the assumption that electoral democracy, once established, creates self-reinforcing pressures for deeper liberalization. The Indonesian case suggests that this assumption is empirically fragile when underlying class structures remain unreformed. Moore's framework, appropriately updated to account for Cold War geopolitics, colonial legacies, and the role of transnational capital in shaping postcolonial class formation, offers a more structurally grounded basis for assessing the durability of democratic arrangements than do the procedural and institutionalist approaches that have dominated comparative democratization research since the 1990s.
Looking forward, the analytical stakes of this conversation are particularly high as Indonesia approaches what may be a defining period for its democratic institutions. The consolidation of executive power under Prabowo, the incorporation of rival political factions into a government of national unity that reduces competitive accountability, and the continuing marginalization of critical civil society voices represent patterns legible within both Moorean structural analysis and more recent work on democratic backsliding. For practitioners in the ODA and civil society support communities, the lesson may be that programmatic investments in formal democratic procedures — election monitoring, parliamentary capacity building, legal reform — need to be complemented by more sustained engagement with questions of structural economic power, labor rights, and the conditions under which a genuinely independent civil society can be sustained against oligarchic capture. For researchers, the article invites a productive return to the question of whether the structural preconditions Moore identified as necessary for stable democratic outcomes can be generated through pathways other than the bourgeois or peasant revolutions he examined historically — through, perhaps, the slow accumulation of associational capacity, the internationalization of middle-class professional networks, or the deepening of regional economic integration. These are questions that will define both the research agenda and the practical politics of democratization in Southeast Asia for the coming generation.