Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-21
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of how nations arrive at democracy or authoritarianism remains one of the most consequential in comparative political science, and nowhere does that question carry greater weight today than in the Global South, where the tide of democratic backsliding and resilient authoritarianism continues to challenge optimistic post-Cold War narratives. Indonesia, as the world's third-largest democracy and the largest Muslim-majority democratic state, occupies a singular position in this debate. Its political history — stretching from Dutch colonial extraction through Sukarno's Guided Democracy, Suharto's three-decade New Order, and the post-1998 Reformasi transition — offers one of the most complex and instructive trajectories of regime change in the modern era. The article under examination, published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, returns to Barrington Moore Jr.'s foundational comparative sociology to reassess Indonesia's long-run political development. This is not an antiquarian exercise. Moore's 1966 masterwork, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, continues to provide the theoretical scaffolding for understanding how agrarian class structures, colonial legacies, and elite alignments shape the institutional possibilities of political modernity. Applying Moore to Indonesia asks us to interrogate both the framework's analytical power and the particularities of Southeast Asian political economy in ways that matter deeply for scholars and policymakers alike.
Barrington Moore's argument, at its core, held that the character of the transition from agrarian to industrial society determines the political form that modernity takes. His three canonical routes — bourgeois revolution leading to liberal democracy in England, France, and the United States; a revolution from above producing fascism in Germany and Japan; and peasant revolution yielding communist authoritarianism in Russia and China — rested on a structural claim about class coalitions. The strength or weakness of the commercial bourgeoisie relative to the landed upper class, and the mode by which agriculture was commercialized, were the decisive variables. His most lapidary formulation — "no bourgeoisie, no democracy" — encapsulated the argument that a vigorous, autonomous commercial middle class was the necessary social basis for parliamentary government, since only such a class had both the interest and the capacity to check royal and aristocratic prerogative. Indonesia complicates this schema profoundly, and the article's analytical contribution lies precisely in tracing where and how Moore's categories require modification to accommodate the Indonesian experience. The colonial political economy under the Dutch was not organized around a powerful landed aristocracy in the Moorean sense, nor did it produce an indigenous bourgeoisie capable of independent political mobilization. The priyayi administrative class, the Chinese-Indonesian commercial stratum, and the plantation economy of the Outer Islands generated a class configuration that does not map cleanly onto Moore's European and East Asian cases, forcing any serious application of the framework to grapple with colonial specificity.
The Indonesian case is particularly illuminating with respect to Moore's treatment of the peasantry. Moore's framework was largely pessimistic about peasant political agency — peasants appear as a subordinate class whose revolutionary potential is structurally constrained by dependence on landlords, fragmented local social organization, and limited access to the institutional levers of state power. Yet Indonesian agrarian history reveals a more complicated dynamic. The mass mobilization of rural Javanese and Outer Island peasants through the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party, in the late Sukarno period constituted a direct challenge to both landed interests and the military-bureaucratic apparatus, culminating in the catastrophic violence of 1965-66, in which an estimated 500,000 or more PKI members and affiliated rural poor were killed by military forces and anti-communist militias. The destruction of the PKI and the associated subordination of organized peasant politics was not an epiphenomenon of Suharto's rise; it was constitutive of the New Order's political economy. Moore's framework would anticipate that the elimination of peasant autonomy, combined with the state's aggressive commercialization of agriculture through the Green Revolution, would produce a form of developmental authoritarianism rather than democracy — and this is precisely what the New Order delivered for thirty-two years. Indonesia thus offers a tragic confirmation of Moore's structural logic, even if the particular class actors and colonial pathways differ from his European reference cases.
What the Moorean lens struggles to account for, however, is the Reformasi transition of 1998 and the subsequent consolidation of electoral democracy in Indonesia. Moore's framework does not offer a robust theory of democratic transitions generated by economic crisis and urban middle-class mobilization against an incumbent authoritarian regime, which is the primary story of 1998. The Asian Financial Crisis destroyed the material legitimacy of Suharto's developmental compact — the implicit bargain in which political exclusion was compensated by rising living standards — and unleashed student-led protest movements that brought down the regime. This suggests that Moore's framework, powerful as it is for explaining the long-run structural preconditions of regime type, requires supplementation by theories of conjunctural crisis and agency-centered transition if it is to account for Indonesia's democratic opening. The article's engagement with this gap reflects broader debates in comparative politics between structuralist and contingency-centered approaches to regime change, debates that carry direct relevance for how international development practitioners and democratic assistance programs understand the conditions under which authoritarian systems become vulnerable. Recognizing that economic shocks can disrupt structurally entrenched authoritarian arrangements does not render structural analysis obsolete; it reminds us that structures constrain but do not determine outcomes, and that the timing and character of crises shape what kinds of alternatives become politically viable.
Indonesia's post-Reformasi experience also raises questions about the quality and sustainability of democracy that Moore's framework cannot fully address, but which follow logically from its premises. The destruction of the PKI and the atomization of organized labor in the countryside left Indonesian civil society weakened at precisely the structural level that Moore associated with durable democratic governance. What emerged after 1998 was what scholars have called "oligarchic democracy" — a system of competitive elections within which former New Order economic and political elites, including military and police networks, retained enormous structural power, channeling it through political parties, regional boss politics, and clientelistic linkages rather than through overt authoritarian repression. This pattern raises the question of whether Indonesia has achieved what Moore would have recognized as substantive democracy — a system in which popular majorities can meaningfully constrain elite power — or whether it has produced a more limited form in which electoral competition coexists with entrenched oligarchic dominance. The global trend toward what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have called "competitive authoritarianism," and what Anna Grzymala-Busse and others have described as the hollowing of democratic institutions from within, gives Indonesia's experience particular resonance beyond Southeast Asia.
For researchers and practitioners working on ODA, civil society development, and democratic governance, the article's application of Moore to Indonesia carries several important policy implications. It underscores that democratic transitions cannot be understood or supported in isolation from long-run structural histories — the class configurations, colonial legacies, and modes of agrarian transformation that Moore identified as foundational do not dissolve overnight with regime change. International development programs that focus narrowly on institutional engineering — electoral reform, anti-corruption measures, judicial independence — without attending to the underlying political economy of elite power risk misdiagnosing the problem. Moore's framework, updated for the Indonesian case, suggests that the sustainability of Indonesian democracy depends heavily on whether organized civil society, labor movements, and rural smallholder interests can build sufficient political capacity to counterbalance oligarchic concentration. Civil society assistance programs, in this light, are not peripheral activities in democratization but potentially central ones, insofar as they address precisely the structural weakness — the absence of an autonomous, organized popular sector — that Moore identified as the social precondition of democracy's fragility. Looking forward, Indonesia's political trajectory in the coming decade, including the implications of Prabowo Subianto's presidency for civil-military relations and press freedom, will serve as a critical test of whether the structural legacies of the New Order continue to weigh upon democratic consolidation or whether new class coalitions and social movements can chart a more durable democratic pathway. The continued analytical relevance of Moore's sixty-year-old framework, as this article demonstrates, is itself a sign of how deeply structural the challenge of democratization remains.