Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-17
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some societies arrive at democracy while others calcify into authoritarianism has preoccupied comparative political scientists for more than half a century. Barrington Moore Jr.'s 1966 masterwork, "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy," offered one of the most durable answers: the fate of political regimes depends critically on the balance of class forces — specifically, the relative power of the landed aristocracy, the commercial bourgeoisie, and the peasantry — as societies navigate the transition from agrarian to industrial capitalism. That a recent article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia applies this Moorean framework to Indonesia is itself significant. Indonesia, the world's third-largest democracy and Southeast Asia's largest economy, has long sat awkwardly within comparative democratization theory — too large and complex to be a footnote, yet too frequently overlooked in the canonical literature dominated by European and Latin American cases. Revisiting Indonesia through Moore's lens at this moment, when democratic institutions across the Global South are under considerable strain, carries both theoretical and practical urgency.
Moore's three pathways — bourgeois revolution leading to liberal democracy, revolution from above leading to fascism, and peasant revolution leading to communism — were derived primarily from the historical experiences of England, France, the United States, Germany, Japan, China, and India. The application of this schema to Southeast Asia, and to Indonesia in particular, demands considerable theoretical adaptation. Indonesia's colonial history under the Dutch East Indies system fundamentally shaped its class structure in ways that diverge from the European and East Asian patterns Moore examined. The VOC and later Dutch colonial administration did not produce a robust indigenous bourgeoisie of the kind that, in Moore's account, drove the English Civil War or the French Revolution. Instead, colonial extractivism cultivated a bifurcated economy in which commercial intermediary roles were largely occupied by Chinese-Indonesian merchants, while the indigenous Javanese elite was incorporated into an administrative class that owed its position to colonial patronage rather than to independent capital accumulation. This colonial legacy — the absence of a self-sustaining domestic bourgeoisie capable of challenging landed or state power — is central to understanding why Indonesia's post-independence trajectory veered first toward Sukarno's idiosyncratic "Guided Democracy" and then toward Suharto's authoritarian New Order, rather than toward liberal constitutionalism.
The New Order period (1966–1998) represents, in Moorean terms, a form of revolution from above — a state-led modernization project that suppressed both left-wing peasant movements and independent bourgeois political organization in the name of stability and development. Suharto's regime was not merely repressive; it was developmentalist in a specific sense that Moore's framework helps illuminate. By subordinating all class actors — peasants through depoliticization of rural life, workers through corporatist labor controls, and business through patronage networks centered on the presidential family and the military — the New Order created conditions for rapid economic growth while foreclosing the class alliances that Moore associated with democratic outcomes. Civil society was hollowed out, not by neglect, but by design: organizations that might have served as incubators of democratic opposition were absorbed into state-sponsored corporatist structures. The scholarly significance of applying Moore's framework here is that it moves the analysis beyond simple narrative accounts of Suharto's personal power and situates his regime within a structural account of class formation and political control.
The democratic opening that followed Suharto's resignation in 1998 — known as Reformasi — presents the most theoretically generative puzzle for a Moorean analysis. Indonesia's transition to democracy was not driven primarily by a triumphant bourgeoisie demanding property rights and political accountability, as Moore's English and French cases would suggest. Rather, it emerged from a confluence of factors: the disintegration of the regime's technocratic legitimacy under the pressure of the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis, the fracturing of elite coalitions within the military and Golkar party apparatus, and the mobilization of urban student movements whose demands were explicitly political rather than rooted in class-based economic interest. This raises a question that a Moore-inspired analysis is particularly well positioned to address: can democracy consolidate in the absence of the bourgeois class actor that Moore's original account privileged? Indonesia's post-Reformasi experience suggests a cautious and conditional yes — but at the cost of a democracy that remains institutionally fragile, vulnerable to elite capture, and susceptible to what scholars have termed "democratic regression" or "deconsolidation." The rise of Prabowo Subianto, a former military commander with documented human rights concerns, to the presidency in 2024 is the most recent and acute expression of this vulnerability, and any updated Moorean account of Indonesian political development must grapple seriously with what his election implies for the class coalitions that currently sustain — or undermine — democratic governance.
For researchers and practitioners working in the fields of ODA, civil society strengthening, and governance reform, the implications of a structural, Moorean reading of Indonesian democracy are both sobering and instructive. Development assistance frameworks that focus narrowly on institutional capacity — building electoral commissions, training judges, supporting anti-corruption agencies — risk underestimating the degree to which democratic sustainability depends on underlying class and social structures that formal institutions cannot easily reshape. If Moore is right that democracy requires a bourgeoisie capable of autonomous political action, then ODA strategies that strengthen small and medium enterprise ecosystems, reduce patronage dependencies in business regulation, and support independent professional associations may matter more for long-term democratization than discrete governance reform projects. Similarly, civil society support that targets only urban, educated, formally organized NGOs may bypass the rural and informal sector actors whose political incorporation — or exclusion — has historically been decisive in shaping Indonesia's regime trajectories. Moore's framework, revived and adapted for the Indonesian context, thus challenges donors and international partners to think structurally rather than procedurally about what democratic consolidation requires.
Looking forward, Indonesia's democratic trajectory over the next decade will be shaped by forces that a Moorean analysis identifies as foundational: the degree to which the emerging middle class and business community develops autonomous political interests not reducible to patronage ties with whoever controls the state; the extent to which rural populations are incorporated into national political life as genuine democratic actors rather than as mobilizable electoral blocs; and the capacity of civil society organizations to survive in an environment where legal and regulatory pressures on independent civic space have intensified. The Journal of Contemporary Asia's decision to publish a Moore-centered analysis of Indonesia at this juncture reflects a broader return in comparative politics to structural, long-run accounts of political change — a corrective to two decades of scholarship that perhaps over-privileged institutional design and elite bargaining at the expense of the deeper social foundations that Moore insisted upon. For the scholarly community and for practitioners committed to supporting democratic governance in Southeast Asia, the lesson is clear: understanding where Indonesia is going requires understanding, in structural terms, where it has been — and that project benefits enormously from the kind of theoretically rigorous historical comparison that Barrington Moore pioneered.