Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-19
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some societies develop stable democratic institutions while others slide toward authoritarianism remains one of the most consequential puzzles in comparative political science. As democratic backsliding accelerates across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, scholars and policymakers alike are returning to foundational theoretical frameworks to make sense of trajectories that resist easy explanation. A recent article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia revisits Barrington Moore's landmark 1966 work, "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy," through the lens of Indonesia's turbulent political history — an exercise that is both theoretically ambitious and practically urgent. At a moment when Indonesia's young democracy faces mounting concerns about executive overreach, civil society restrictions, and the enduring influence of military-linked elites, this kind of historically grounded structural analysis offers essential perspective that short-term electoral studies often fail to provide.
Barrington Moore's central argument, distilled in the famous dictum "no bourgeoisie, no democracy," posited that the political outcomes of modernization — liberal democracy, fascism, or communist revolution — were determined by the shifting alliances among landed aristocracies, commercial bourgeoisies, and peasant classes as agrarian economies transitioned toward industrialization. In cases where a strong commercial bourgeoisie allied with the crown against the peasantry, fascism tended to emerge. Where the peasantry mobilized from below without effective bourgeois leadership, communist revolutions followed. Liberal democracy, Moore argued, required a bourgeoisie capable of checking aristocratic power from above while containing peasant radicalism from below. Applying this framework to Indonesia is not a straightforward exercise, since Moore's original analysis centered on Western Europe, the United States, China, Japan, and India, leaving Southeast Asia largely unexamined. Yet precisely this analytical gap makes the current article's intervention valuable. Indonesia's colonial experience under Dutch rule created a distinctive agrarian structure in which a comprador commercial class emerged largely under colonial patronage rather than through autonomous capitalist development, complicating Moore's class-based predictions in ways that illuminate both the specificities of postcolonial politics and the limits of Eurocentric developmental schemas.
Indonesia's political trajectory since independence in 1945 has oscillated in ways that resist linear narratives of democratization. Sukarno's Guided Democracy of the late 1950s through mid-1960s represented an attempt to forge a nationalist synthesis between competing ideological blocs — the military, Islamist parties, and the Indonesian Communist Party — but ultimately collapsed into the bloody anti-communist purges of 1965 and 1966 that installed Suharto's New Order regime. Under Suharto, who governed until 1998, Indonesia's political economy was defined by a peculiar fusion of military corporatism, ethnic Chinese business networks, and developmentalist patronage — what scholars have termed "bureaucratic authoritarianism" in a Southeast Asian variant. The Reformasi transition that followed Suharto's fall appeared to vindicate optimistic accounts of democratic consolidation, and Indonesia's successful conduct of direct elections, decentralization reforms, and the establishment of an independent judiciary were celebrated internationally as evidence that the world's largest Muslim-majority country could sustain liberal democratic institutions. What this article implicitly contests is the assumption that these institutional gains were rooted in sufficiently robust structural transformations of the kind Moore's framework demands. If the commercial bourgeoisie remains entangled with the military-linked oligarchy inherited from the New Order, and if agrarian class relations in Java and the outer islands continue to constrain autonomous peasant political agency, the structural foundations of Indonesian democracy may be considerably more fragile than its institutional surface suggests.
The relevance of this analysis extends well beyond academic debate. International donors and ODA-aligned civil society programs have invested heavily in Indonesia's democratic institutions — supporting judicial reform, anti-corruption bodies like the Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK), free press initiatives, and electoral integrity mechanisms. Yet this article's implicit Moorean framing raises a discomforting question: can externally financed institutional reforms produce durable democratic outcomes when the underlying class structure has not fundamentally shifted? The experience of the past decade offers grounds for concern. Under Joko Widodo, elected in 2014 as a reformist outsider, Indonesia witnessed a systematic weakening of the KPK through legislative revision, increasing criminalization of civil society critics under broad cybercrime and blasphemy statutes, and a resurgence of military involvement in civilian governance. The 2024 election of former general Prabowo Subianto — a figure with a deeply contested human rights record from the New Order period — as president completes a political arc that a Moorean analysis would not find surprising. When the bourgeoisie remains structurally dependent on military-linked patronage networks, and when rural constituencies are mobilized through clientelist rather than programmatic politics, the social foundations for liberal democracy remain precarious regardless of the formal electoral architecture in place.
For researchers working within ODA and civil society frameworks, this article's engagement with Moore signals an important methodological reorientation. The field has long favored institutional and governance indicators — electoral integrity scores, press freedom rankings, rule-of-law indices — that capture outcomes but often obscure the structural conditions that generate them. A return to political economy analysis, attentive to agrarian class relations, the organization of capital, and the historical legacies of colonial extraction, does not invalidate institutional approaches but contextualizes their limits. Indonesia's case suggests that civil society programs focused narrowly on capacity building and legal reform may achieve meaningful but ultimately bounded gains if they are not accompanied by attention to the political economy of land, labor, and capital that shapes who actually governs and in whose interests. This points toward a richer research agenda that links macro-structural analysis to mid-range questions about how ODA can support not only institutional form but the social coalitions capable of sustaining democratic substance.
Looking forward, Indonesia under Prabowo will be a critical test case for whether democratic backsliding proceeds further or stabilizes at a partial equilibrium. The international community's response — in terms of ODA conditionality, diplomatic signaling, and support for independent civil society — will matter at the margins, but this article's Moorean lens suggests that deeper structural questions will ultimately be determinative. Scholars would do well to examine whether Indonesia's expanding middle class, often theorized as a natural constituency for democratic deepening, is developing the autonomous political agency Moore associated with democratizing bourgeoisies or whether it remains absorbed into patronage networks that structurally align its interests with elite continuity. The Indonesian case also carries broader implications for comparative research across Southeast Asia and the developing world: the democratic wave of the 1990s may have run ahead of the structural transformations necessary to sustain it, and the current era of backsliding is in part a structural correction that institutional analysis alone is ill-equipped to explain. Revisiting Moore is not an exercise in nostalgia for grand theory but a recognition that durable answers to the democracy question require taking seriously the long arc of social structure, class formation, and historical contingency — precisely the analytical register this article brings to one of the developing world's most consequential democratic experiments.