Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-27
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of how societies arrive at democracy or authoritarianism has never been more urgent. Across the globe, democratic institutions face pressures from resurgent populist nationalism, the centralization of executive power, and the erosion of civil society space. Emerging economies that once seemed on firm trajectories toward liberal consolidation are revisiting authoritarian temptations, while scholars and policymakers alike search for the structural conditions that make democratic reversals more or less likely. It is in this context that a return to Barrington Moore Jr.'s foundational comparative sociology — specifically his 1966 masterwork "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy" — offers both analytical purchase and renewed relevance. The article under consideration in the Journal of Contemporary Asia applies Moore's framework to Indonesia, one of the most consequential and complex democratic experiments in the developing world, asking whether his structural pathways retain explanatory power for a society that has oscillated dramatically between authoritarian consolidation and democratic opening over the past century.
Barrington Moore's central thesis, now six decades old, rested on the proposition that the political character of modern states is determined largely by the nature of agrarian class relations and the role of the landed upper class in the transition to commercial agriculture. Where a strong bourgeoisie emerged in alliance with the crown to check aristocratic and peasant power, liberal democracy followed — as in England, France, and the United States. Where landed elites retained dominance and aligned with the state to suppress both the bourgeoisie and the peasantry, fascism or conservative authoritarianism emerged — as in Germany and Japan. Where the peasantry mobilized against both landlords and the old order in the absence of a reform-oriented bourgeoisie, communist revolution became the route — as in China and Russia. Moore's schema, though long criticized for its Eurocentrism, its neglect of colonialism, and its deterministic structuralism, nonetheless established a durable agenda: that the path a society takes toward or away from democracy depends critically on who holds economic power and how they relate to state authority and subordinate classes. The article's application of this framework to Indonesia constitutes an important intervention in the scholarly literature, which has tended to treat Indonesian democratization either through modernization-theory lenses emphasizing middle-class growth, or through institutionalist accounts emphasizing elite pacts and constitutional design.
Indonesia's political history offers a particularly rich and complicated terrain for testing Moore's arguments. The colonial period under Dutch rule did not produce the kind of commercially independent landowning class that Moore identified as democracy's social precondition. Instead, it generated a hybrid agrarian structure of smallholder agriculture, colonial plantation systems, and comprador merchant classes — predominantly ethnic Chinese — that were systematically excluded from political power. At independence, Sukarno's nationalism papered over these structural tensions without resolving them. His "Guided Democracy" of the late 1950s and early 1960s represented precisely the kind of executive-centric authoritarianism that emerges when state elites cannot rely on an autonomous bourgeoisie to organize political life and must instead impose order from above. Suharto's New Order, established after the 1965-1966 massacres that killed somewhere between 500,000 and one million people, went further: it institutionalized military-bureaucratic dominance (the dwifungsi doctrine), suppressed autonomous civil society, and channeled capitalist development through a tightly controlled patronage network. The social result was exactly what Moore would have predicted: a modernizing but deeply illiberal state in which economic growth and political repression coexisted for over three decades.
The Reformasi period that followed Suharto's fall in 1998 complicates the Moorean picture in instructive ways. Indonesia's transition to electoral democracy was rapid, contested, and improbable by structural standards: the bourgeoisie was weak and dependent on state contracts, the peasantry was fragmented and demobilized, and the military retained significant institutional autonomy. What Moore's framework underweights, and what the article presumably explores, is the agency of political elites in negotiating transitions under conditions of severe economic crisis — the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis providing the triggering shock — and the role of civil society organizations, Islamic mass movements, and student mobilizations in delegitimizing authoritarian rule. Indonesia's democracy thus emerged not from the structural conditions Moore identified but in partial tension with them, a finding that invites theoretical refinement rather than wholesale rejection of his approach. The persistence of oligarchic economic power, the continuing political role of former military figures, and the weakness of programmatic political parties all suggest that Indonesia's democracy rests on incomplete structural foundations — a condition that makes its quality, and its durability, genuinely uncertain.
This uncertainty has taken on fresh urgency with the 2024 election of Prabowo Subianto, a former special forces commander with a documented human rights record from the Suharto era, to the Indonesian presidency. From a Moorean perspective, the trajectory is legible: the military-adjacent elite, never fully displaced from power during Reformasi, has reasserted itself through electoral mechanisms rather than coups. Civil society organizations, Islamic civil society networks, and opposition media face a more constrained environment. These developments have significant implications for international development actors, ODA institutions, and researchers focused on democratic governance. Aid programs premised on institutional strengthening — judicial reform, anti-corruption commissions, legislative capacity building — confront the reality that formal institutions can be captured or hollowed out when underlying class and elite structures remain unreformed. Moore's structural lens is a useful corrective to the procedural optimism of much democracy-support programming, which too often assumes that elections and constitutional design are sufficient to sustain democratic outcomes regardless of the social forces that animate or undermine them.
For practitioners working at the intersection of civil society development and political economy, the lesson of revisiting Moore through an Indonesian lens is that sustainable democratic development requires attending to who benefits from and who is excluded from economic growth. The consolidation of oligarchic wealth, the suppression of rural labor organizing, and the marginalization of minority economic actors are not merely equity concerns — they are structural conditions that generate the social pressures Moore identified as democracy's undoing. Aid agencies and research institutes, including those focused on ODA effectiveness in Southeast Asia, would benefit from disaggregating the concept of "civil society" by class position and economic function, asking not just whether civil society organizations exist but whether they represent constituencies capable of checking concentrated power. As Indonesia enters what may be a consequential period of democratic stress testing, scholarly work that brings historical-structural analysis into dialogue with contemporary political economy — as this article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia appears to do — offers exactly the kind of grounded, critical perspective that both the research community and policy practitioners urgently need.