Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-17
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The relationship between social structure and political regime type has preoccupied comparative political scientists since at least the middle of the twentieth century, and few frameworks have proven more durable or more contested than that of Barrington Moore, whose 1966 magnum opus "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy" proposed a stark structural logic linking the class character of agrarian capitalism to the fate of democratic governance. In the contemporary moment — when democratic backsliding has become a near-universal concern across the Global South and when Indonesia, the world's third-largest democracy and the largest Muslim-majority nation, faces renewed questions about the resilience of its post-authoritarian institutions — returning to Moore's analytical architecture is not merely an exercise in intellectual history. It is an urgent task for anyone seeking to understand why some societies break toward open politics and others toward concentrated power, and what the Indonesian case reveals about the limits and extensions of theories built primarily from the experience of European and East Asian transformations.
Moore's central thesis, encapsulated in his aphorism that "no bourgeoisie, no democracy," rested on a structural reading of class coalitions in the transition from agrarian to industrial society. Where the landed aristocracy allied with a dependent commercial class against the peasantry, the result was fascism. Where peasant-based revolutionary movements displaced the old agrarian order, communism followed. And where a sufficiently autonomous bourgeoisie broke the power of the landed elite through something approximating a bourgeois revolution, liberal democracy became possible. This tripartite schema, applied to England, France, the United States, Germany, Japan, and China, was never intended as a universal law, but it generated an enormously productive research program that subsequent scholars extended, revised, and challenged for decades. Applying it to Indonesia — a postcolonial society with a distinctive colonial legacy of Dutch extractive capitalism, a large and politically complex peasantry, a commercial class deeply fragmented along ethnic lines, and a military that has functioned as both a regime-sustaining institution and an economic actor — requires both fidelity to Moore's structural logic and sensitivity to what that logic cannot adequately capture.
The Indonesian case is in many respects a puzzle from a Moorean perspective. The transition from Suharto's New Order authoritarianism in 1998, which occurred following the Asian financial crisis and a period of intense popular mobilization known as Reformasi, did not follow the classic bourgeois-revolutionary pathway that Moore associated with durable democratization. The Indonesian middle class, though it had grown substantially under the New Order's developmentalist policies, was neither ideologically coherent nor organizationally independent enough to serve as the vanguard of a class-driven democratic rupture. What occurred instead was closer to an elite-negotiated transition in which military factions, technocratic reformers, and civil society movements combined under conditions of acute economic crisis to displace a personalist dictatorship without dismantling the underlying structures of oligarchic power. Scholars working in the tradition of Jeffrey Winters on oligarchy, or Richard Robison and Vedi Hadiz on the political economy of Southeast Asian capitalism, have long argued that Indonesia's democracy has been captured by precisely the class actors whose interests Moore might have predicted would resist it — not because they value democratic freedoms, but because democratic electoral competition, when properly managed, can serve as a mechanism for distributing rents among competing elite factions. This insight does not invalidate Moore, but it complicates the assumption that bourgeois actors, once empowered, will necessarily produce the liberal political institutions associated with the Northwestern European pathway.
An article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia applying Moore's framework to Indonesia participates in a growing body of comparative-historical scholarship that seeks to bring postcolonial cases into dialogue with canonical theories of political development. This is itself a significant scholarly intervention. Moore's original case selection was not accidental; it reflected the intellectual horizons of mid-twentieth-century Western social science, which treated European and East Asian experiences as the relevant universe for generating developmental theory. The incorporation of Southeast Asian cases into this tradition requires scholars to grapple with what postcolonial theorists have called the particular temporality of colonial capitalism — the way that Dutch colonial policy created forms of economic organization, ethnic stratification, and political dependency that do not map neatly onto the class structures Moore analyzed. The forced cultivation system, the role of Chinese commercial intermediaries, the suppression of indigenous capitalist development, and the particular form of the Indonesian military as a territorial institution with deep civilian economic entanglements all constitute structural conditions that a Moorean analysis must either incorporate or acknowledge as limiting conditions. Contemporary scholarship on this question increasingly argues that Indonesia represents neither a simple confirmation nor a refutation of Moore's thesis, but rather a case that demands a hybridized analytical vocabulary capable of accounting for both structural class dynamics and the contingent, agency-laden quality of political transitions under conditions of late development.
The policy implications of this line of inquiry extend well beyond the academic seminar. For international development organizations, bilateral donors, and civil society actors engaged with Indonesia, the question of whether democratic institutions are structurally consolidated or remain vulnerable to elite capture has direct consequences for program design and advocacy strategy. If the Moorean reading suggests that Indonesia's democratic transition was insufficiently grounded in an autonomous, organized middle class or a genuine rupture with oligarchic economic power, then the apparent stability of post-1998 democratic institutions may conceal persistent fragility. The 2024 election of Prabowo Subianto — a former military officer with a contested human rights record from the New Order period — to the Indonesian presidency has intensified these concerns, as has the increasingly visible role of political dynasties, the weakening of civil society spaces, and the use of majoritarian democratic mechanisms to marginalize minority religious communities. ODA actors and civil society support programs must grapple with the possibility that electoral democracy, as currently constituted in Indonesia, functions more as an arena for oligarchic competition than as a mechanism for popular accountability, and that capacity-building interventions that treat democratic institutions as essentially sound but merely technically deficient will systematically miss the structural sources of democratic weakness.
Looking forward, the analytical project that an article of this type represents — critically applying Moore's comparative historical sociology to an undertheorized Southeast Asian case — points toward several productive research directions. First, there is the question of how digital political economy interacts with the class dynamics Moore identified: Indonesia's extraordinarily high rates of social media use have created new mechanisms for political mobilization and elite manipulation alike, and it is unclear whether these dynamics tend to reinforce or to destabilize existing oligarchic structures. Second, there is the comparative question of how Indonesia's trajectory relates to democratic backsliding in neighboring states — particularly the Philippines under Duterte and his successors, and Thailand's repeated cycle of military coups and electoral restoration — in ways that might suggest regional patterns of Southeast Asian political development that neither Moore nor his immediate successors theorized. Third, and most fundamentally, there remains the question of whether the structural conditions for deeper democratic consolidation in Indonesia — a more autonomous and politically assertive civil society, a middle class less economically dependent on state patronage, a military more fully subordinated to civilian oversight — are emerging incrementally beneath the surface of Indonesia's oligarchic democracy, or whether the current configuration of power is capable of reproducing itself indefinitely. For scholars of comparative politics and for practitioners engaged with Indonesian civil society, these questions are not merely theoretical. They bear directly on what kinds of political transformation are possible, on what timescales, and through what coalitions of actors — which is, in the end, precisely the set of questions that Barrington Moore set out to answer more than half a century ago.