Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-20
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of how societies arrive at democracy — or fail to — remains one of the most enduring preoccupations of comparative politics. In an era defined by democratic backsliding across the Global South, renewed authoritarian consolidation in Southeast Asia, and mounting doubts about the durability of third-wave democratization, revisiting foundational theoretical frameworks is not merely an academic exercise. It is a practical necessity. The article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, engaging Barrington Moore's seminal structural analysis in relation to Indonesia's political trajectory, arrives at a moment of considerable significance. Indonesia, long celebrated as one of the democratic world's most improbable success stories, now faces renewed scrutiny over the depth and resilience of its post-1998 democratic settlement. By returning to Moore's structural lens, the article invites scholars and policymakers alike to interrogate whether Indonesia's democratic transition was rooted in lasting social transformations or whether it rested on more contingent and fragile foundations.
Barrington Moore's 1966 masterwork, "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy," proposed that the political character of modern states — liberal democratic, fascist, or communist — could be traced to the structural relationships among three key social classes during agrarian transformation: the landed aristocracy, the commercial bourgeoisie, and the peasantry. His central thesis, captured in the famous aphorism "no bourgeois, no democracy," held that liberal democratic outcomes depended on the emergence of an economically independent commercial and industrial class capable of wresting political power from agrarian elites and establishing constitutional constraints on state authority. Where landed elites retained dominance and co-opted a weak bourgeoisie into conservative modernization from above, the result was authoritarian capitalism of the fascist variety. Where peasant grievances went unresolved and urban commercialization remained stunted, revolutionary communist outcomes became more likely. Applying this tripartite schema to Indonesia — a post-colonial archipelagic state of extraordinary ethnic, regional, and economic complexity — necessarily involves both theoretical creativity and analytical humility. The article in question takes on precisely this challenge, mapping Indonesia's oscillation between authoritarianism and electoral democracy against the structural variables Moore identified.
Indonesia's modern political history presents a compelling and difficult test case for Moorean analysis. The Dutch colonial economy created a highly stratified agrarian order in Java while simultaneously suppressing indigenous commercial class formation, producing a post-independence society in which neither a strong bourgeoisie nor a coherent landed gentry existed in recognizable European form. Sukarno's Guided Democracy of the late 1950s and early 1960s reflected this structural ambiguity: a nationalist elite attempting to hold together an inchoate coalition of military, religious, and leftist forces in the absence of stable class anchors for political order. The catastrophic violence of 1965–66, in which the Indonesian army dismantled the PKI (the Indonesian Communist Party, then one of the world's largest) and installed General Suharto, represents in Moorean terms a brutal resolution of unresolved class and ideological tensions. Suharto's New Order (1966–1998) institutionalized a form of authoritarian developmental capitalism that bears structural resemblance to what Moore termed "revolution from above" — state-led modernization that generated economic growth while suppressing autonomous civil society and political pluralism. The collapse of the New Order in 1998 under the pressure of the Asian financial crisis, student protest movements, and elite fragmentation set in motion a democratization process that has been widely analyzed but remains, as the article suggests, theoretically underexplored through a structural lens.
The significance of the article's intervention lies not simply in applying Moore to Indonesia but in asking what that application reveals about the current state of Indonesian democracy and its regional implications. Post-1998 Indonesia decentralized authority dramatically, held successive free elections, developed a competitive multiparty system, and allowed civil society organizations to flourish — achievements that were, just two decades earlier, unimaginable. Yet the structural conditions Moore associated with robust liberal democracy — an independent bourgeoisie committed to rule of law, secure property rights, and constitutional constraints on executive power — remain ambiguously present in Indonesia. Large segments of the business community have historically been tied to state patronage networks rather than constituted as an autonomous political force. Agrarian transformation has proceeded unevenly, with persistent rural poverty coexisting alongside rapid urban growth. The military retains significant political and economic interests. These structural features help explain why Indonesia's democracy, impressive in its procedural achievements, has shown signs of what scholars now describe as democratic backsliding: the gradual erosion of institutional checks, narrowing of civil liberties, and accommodation of oligarchic economic power within the shell of electoral competition. The election of Prabowo Subianto to the presidency in 2024 — a former military commander with a contested human rights record — has sharpened these concerns considerably, adding urgency to the analytical questions the article raises.
Connecting this structural analysis to broader regional and global trends illuminates both the distinctiveness and the representativeness of the Indonesian case. Across Southeast Asia, a pattern has emerged in which electoral democracy coexists with increasingly dominant executive power, weakened judicial independence, and the systematic marginalization of critical civil society organizations. Thailand, the Philippines, and Cambodia each represent variants of this regional trajectory, though through different institutional mechanisms and at different speeds. What Moore's framework contributes to understanding these cases is a reminder that democracy is not simply a set of rules or procedures that can be transplanted or consolidated through technical assistance and electoral monitoring — however important these interventions may be from an ODA standpoint. Democracy, in the Moorean understanding, is an outcome of underlying class configurations and their historical resolution. The international development community's persistent tendency to treat democratic consolidation as primarily a question of institutional design, legal reform, or civic education risks overlooking the deeper structural determinants that this article brings back into view. Donors and civil society organizations working on governance in Indonesia and comparable contexts would benefit from greater analytical attention to the political economy of class formation, the distribution of economic power between state and private actors, and the structural position of rural and urban working populations within the national political order.
The policy implications of this structural perspective are significant and in some respects uncomfortable for mainstream development discourse. If the resilience of democracy depends on the emergence of genuinely independent economic actors with interests in constitutional governance rather than state favor, then ODA programs focused narrowly on electoral administration or anti-corruption commissions may be necessary but insufficient conditions for democratic consolidation. Supporting independent media, autonomous business associations, smallholder agricultural organizations, and labor unions — the kinds of civil society formations that, in Moore's historical account, were preconditions for viable democratic orders — deserves greater prominence in development programming. At the same time, the article's analytical framing should caution against both excessive optimism and fatalism. Indonesia has already achieved something structurally significant: the dismantling of a thirty-two-year authoritarian regime without civil war, the establishment of functioning electoral institutions, and the empowerment of subnational governments across a vast and diverse territory. These are not trivial achievements, and they have created social and institutional facts that create real obstacles to authoritarian reversal. The research significance of the article lies precisely in its insistence that understanding how Indonesia got here, and where it might go, requires engagement with long-run structural history rather than event-driven analysis alone.
Looking forward, the article's engagement with Moore opens a productive research agenda for scholars of Southeast Asian politics, development studies, and comparative democratization. As Indonesia approaches the midpoint of the Prabowo presidency, empirical tracking of institutional changes — the independence of anti-corruption bodies, the space available for opposition parties and civil society groups, the treatment of press freedom and academic inquiry — will be essential. But this empirical tracking must be situated within the structural analysis the article recommends. Researchers should attend to whether Indonesia's economic transformation is producing a more genuinely independent commercial and professional class with structural incentives to defend institutional constraints on executive power, or whether the opposite trajectory — in which the business community accommodates itself to an increasingly dominant state — is consolidating. For practitioners in international development, ODA agencies, and civil society organizations working in Indonesia, the central lesson may be that investments in democratic governance must be matched by serious engagement with the political economy of class and capital — questions that are harder to operationalize than institutional benchmarks but ultimately more fundamental to whether democratic gains endure. Barrington Moore wrote in the shadow of fascism and Stalinism; his framework, revisited in the context of contemporary Indonesia, speaks with unexpected relevance to the challenges of democratic sustainability in the twenty-first century.