Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-19
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some societies transition toward democratic governance while others succumb to authoritarian consolidation remains one of the most consequential problems in comparative politics and development studies. In an era marked by democratic recession across multiple regions — from Southeast Asia to Eastern Europe to Latin America — revisiting foundational theoretical frameworks that explain these divergent outcomes is not merely an academic exercise. It is a matter of urgent practical importance for policymakers, development practitioners, and civil society actors who work at the intersection of political economy and governance reform. The Journal of Contemporary Asia article applying Barrington Moore's pathways framework to the Indonesian case arrives at a particularly meaningful historical juncture: Indonesia has recently installed a new president whose rise reflects deep ambiguities in the country's post-authoritarian settlement, and the international development community continues to grapple with how best to support democratic consolidation in a country that represents nearly three hundred million people and the world's largest Muslim-majority democracy.
Barrington Moore Jr.'s 1966 magnum opus, "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy," proposed that the class alliances formed during a society's transition from agrarian to industrial economy determine its long-run political trajectory. Moore identified three broad pathways: the bourgeois-democratic route taken by England, France, and the United States, in which a commercially assertive landed class and rising urban bourgeoisie eventually dismantled feudal structures and created conditions hospitable to liberal governance; the conservative-fascist route followed by Germany and Japan, where modernization was driven by a top-down coalition of reactionary agrarian elites and state-directed industrialists, producing nationalist authoritarianism; and the communist-revolutionary route experienced by Russia and China, where a weak bourgeoisie, an intransigent landed upper class, and a mobilized peasantry combined to produce revolutionary upheaval and one-party states. Applying this tripartite schema to Indonesia immediately presents analytical challenges, because Indonesia's path defies easy categorization under any of Moore's original cases. The article under consideration takes this tension seriously, and the intellectual value of revisiting Moore through the Indonesian lens lies precisely in what the discrepancies reveal about both the durability and the limits of structural-historical explanation in comparative politics.
Indonesia's political history offers a remarkably compressed illustration of the forces Moore identified. The Dutch colonial period, which lasted more than three centuries, profoundly shaped class structure in ways that differed from the European societies Moore studied. Colonial extraction prevented the emergence of an independent indigenous bourgeoisie on the English or French model. Land tenure arrangements varied dramatically across the archipelago, and the colonial "cultivation system" oriented peasant labor toward export crops for metropolitan benefit rather than toward internal market development. When independence came in 1945 under Sukarno, the new republic inherited these structural deformities: a weak commercial class, an agrarian sector subordinated to external interests, and a political landscape dominated by competing nationalist, communist, and Islamist movements rather than class-based alignments of the kind Moore emphasized. Sukarno's "Guided Democracy" — itself a repudiation of liberal parliamentary governance — and then the violent installation of Suharto's New Order regime following the 1965 massacre of hundreds of thousands of suspected communists, illustrates that Indonesia's mid-century trajectory most closely resembled Moore's conservative-authoritarian pathway, driven by a military-bureaucratic elite allied with domestic and foreign capital interests and violently suppressing peasant and labor mobilization.
The Reformasi transition of 1998, triggered by the Asian Financial Crisis and sustained by student-led mass protest, introduced new variables that Moore's framework did not anticipate with precision. Indonesia democratized rapidly without a robust, autonomous bourgeoisie in the classical sense, without the destruction of the old agrarian elite, and without resolving the underlying structural inequalities that Moore associated with democratic instability. What emerged instead was a polyarchic system dominated by oligarchic networks — former Suharto-era business conglomerates, regional political bosses, and elements of the military establishment — who adapted to democratic forms while retaining substantive economic and coercive power. Scholars like Jeffrey Winters have characterized this arrangement as "oligarchic democracy," a formation that explains both Indonesia's genuine electoral pluralism and its persistent failures to prosecute corruption, strengthen labor rights, or achieve redistributive reform. This pattern suggests that Moore's structural variables remain relevant but must be supplemented by an account of how elites strategically adapt to democratic institutions rather than simply being swept aside by them. The article's contribution to this ongoing theoretical conversation reflects the maturation of comparative politics as a discipline that takes historical specificity seriously while still seeking generalizable insights.
The policy implications of this kind of structural-historical analysis are substantial, particularly for the international development and ODA community. If Indonesia's democratic deficits are rooted not in cultural factors or institutional design failures alone, but in the enduring structural power of oligarchic class formations that predate Reformasi, then democracy-support programming oriented primarily toward electoral administration, legal reform, or civil society capacity-building will reach inherent limits. Development agencies and bilateral donors have invested considerably in Indonesian governance reform over the past quarter century, with measurable results in some areas — decentralization, local electoral competition, press freedom — and persistent disappointments in others, particularly anti-corruption efforts and economic inclusion. The theoretical argument implicit in the Moore framework suggests that durable democratization requires attention to the material bases of oligarchic power: patterns of land ownership, natural resource concessions, corporate ownership concentration, and the relationship between business interests and the security sector. This is politically far more difficult terrain for external actors to engage than institutional capacity-building, but the analytical literature increasingly points toward its centrality.
Looking forward, the Indonesian case will likely serve as a critical test for theories of democratic resilience and backsliding through the remainder of this decade. President Prabowo Subianto, who took office in 2024 with a mandate that reflects both genuine popular appeal and elite consolidation, embodies the contradictions that Moore's framework helps illuminate: a figure who emerged from the Suharto-era military establishment, has faced serious human rights allegations, and yet operates within a constitutional democratic framework that constrains his options while also offering opportunities for incremental executive aggrandizement. Civil society organizations, investigative journalists, and independent legal institutions will function as the primary bulwarks against authoritarian regression, but their capacity to do so depends on resource flows, international attention, and the ability of domestic political coalitions to maintain democratic norms under pressure. For researchers, the Indonesia case offers an opportunity to assess whether structural-historical frameworks developed for earlier historical periods and different regional contexts retain explanatory power in a twenty-first-century emerging-market democracy embedded in regional and global economic systems Moore could not have foreseen. For practitioners, the lesson is that structural analysis must inform programmatic choices if development investments in democratic governance are to move beyond symptom treatment toward the deeper conditions that determine whether democratic forms can acquire genuinely democratic substance.