Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-18
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some societies develop stable democratic institutions while others veer toward authoritarian consolidation has animated comparative politics for decades, but it has returned to the fore with renewed urgency. Across the Indo-Pacific, liberal democratic norms that seemed entrenched after the wave of transitions in the late twentieth century are now under observable strain. Indonesia, the world's third-largest democracy and the largest Muslim-majority nation on earth, sits at the center of this anxiety. As Prabowo Subianto — a former military general with a documented history of human rights abuses — settles into the presidency, scholars and policymakers alike are asking a foundational question: what structural forces actually determine whether a country moves toward sustainable self-governance or slips back into autocratic habit? The recent article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia revisiting Barrington Moore's canonical framework in the context of Indonesia arrives at a propitious moment, offering historical and theoretical leverage on one of Southeast Asia's most consequential political trajectories.
Barrington Moore's 1966 work "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy" remains one of the most influential — and most contested — works in comparative historical sociology. Moore's central claim was that the path a country takes to modernity, whether democratic, fascist, or communist, is substantially determined by the agrarian class structure inherited from earlier periods and by the relationship between the landed elite, the commercial bourgeoisie, and the peasantry. His famous condensed formulation — "no bourgeoisie, no democracy" — encapsulated the argument that a strong, independent commercial class capable of challenging aristocratic and state power was a near-necessary precondition for liberal democracy. Applying this macro-historical lens to Indonesia is intellectually ambitious because the Indonesian case both confirms and complicates Moore's typology in instructive ways. Indonesia's colonial experience under the Dutch VOC and later the Netherlands East Indies created an agrarian structure heavily shaped by extraction for export — plantation agriculture, forced cultivation systems, and labor coercion — that systematically stunted the emergence of an autonomous indigenous commercial bourgeoisie. This colonial deformation of class structure, Moore's framework would predict, left independent Indonesia structurally vulnerable to authoritarian consolidation, and indeed the New Order under Suharto from 1965 to 1998 bore out that prediction with brutal efficiency.
Yet the Indonesian case also pushes back against a simple Moorean determinism. The Reformasi transition of 1998, which ended Suharto's three-decade rule and inaugurated a period of remarkably rapid democratic institutionalization, was not driven primarily by a triumphant bourgeoisie subduing a landed aristocracy. It was driven by a heterogeneous coalition of urban civil society, student movements, fractured military elites, and a middle class itself largely a product of the New Order's developmentalist policies. This internal complexity matters theoretically because it suggests that the pathways to democracy in late-developing post-colonial societies cannot be read directly off Moore's class map without significant adaptation. Civil society — organized outside the state and outside purely market logics — played a structuring role that Moore's framework, focused on agrarian class relations, did not fully anticipate. The article under review appears to engage precisely this tension, asking whether Moore's pathways need to be supplemented, revised, or partially abandoned when applied to a post-colonial archipelagic state whose political development was always mediated by colonial legacies, ethnic pluralism, and the variable geometry of a vast and geographically dispersed society.
The regional and global significance of revisiting these questions cannot be understated. Indonesia's Reformasi period was treated in much of the development literature of the early 2000s as a model of democratic consolidation in a Muslim-majority context — evidence against the cultural-civilizational determinism that denied the compatibility of Islam and liberal democracy. Donors, international NGOs, and bilateral ODA programs invested substantially in Indonesian civil society, judicial reform, anti-corruption institutions, and electoral integrity mechanisms on the assumption that democratic gains were durable and self-reinforcing. The gradual erosion of those gains under Joko Widodo — through the instrumentalization of the Constitutional Court, the weakening of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), and the creeping re-militarization of civilian governance — and the election of Prabowo in 2024 have raised uncomfortable questions about whether those investments correctly diagnosed the structural roots of democratic fragility. From an ODA and development policy perspective, this matters enormously. If democratic backsliding in Indonesia is primarily a product of elite-level institutional manipulation, then governance aid that focuses on civil society capacity-building may be necessary but insufficient. If, on the other hand, structural factors identified by a Moorean analysis — the weakness of horizontal class alliances, the persistence of predatory resource politics, the dependence of the middle class on state patronage — are driving forces, then the entire framework of demand-side democratic aid needs reconsideration.
The broader comparative literature on democratic backsliding has increasingly moved toward identifying the conditions under which elected leaders dismantle democratic constraints incrementally rather than through outright coup, what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way called competitive authoritarianism and what more recent scholars have termed autocratization. Indonesia fits this pattern disturbingly well: elections continue, civil society organizations continue to operate, and formal constitutional structures remain nominally intact, but the effective space for opposition, judicial independence, and investigative journalism has contracted measurably. A Barrington Moore-informed analysis would ask whether these surface-level institutional changes reflect deeper shifts in the balance of class and organizational forces — whether the Indonesian middle class, whose political orientation was always ambivalent, has decisively aligned with a developmentalist authoritarian settlement that promises material stability at the cost of accountability, or whether the structural conditions for a renewal of democratic contestation remain latent in Indonesian society. This is not merely an academic question. The answer has implications for how civil society organizations in Indonesia position their work, how international partners calibrate their engagement, and whether regional democratic norms transmitted through ASEAN or bilateral partnerships have any meaningful purchase on elite behavior.
Looking forward, the analytical framework offered by revisiting Moore in the Indonesian context points toward several research and policy priorities. First, scholars need more granular longitudinal data on Indonesian civil society organizational capacity since Reformasi, including how state co-optation, legal restriction, and resource pressures have reshaped the landscape of non-state actors that were central to the 1998 transition. Second, the relationship between Indonesia's resource-dependent political economy — coal, palm oil, nickel — and the financing of authoritarian tendencies deserves sustained attention, since commodity rents have historically enabled state elites to sidestep the fiscal bargains with society that generate democratic accountability. Third, and most importantly for practitioners in the ODA space, the Indonesian case suggests that democracy support programs need to grapple more seriously with structural political economy rather than treating governance as a purely technical or institutional problem solvable by training judges, funding civil society groups, or running election observation missions. Barrington Moore's enduring contribution was to insist that political outcomes are rooted in social structure and historical trajectory, not in institutional design alone. Indonesia's current trajectory makes that insistence feel less like historical sociology and more like a live policy warning.