Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-01
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some societies arrive at democratic governance while others slide into or remain under authoritarian rule is one of the most enduring and consequential problems in comparative politics. Barrington Moore Jr.'s landmark 1966 study, *Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy*, offered a structural answer rooted in agrarian class relations, arguing that the specific configuration of landlords, peasants, and a commercializing bourgeoisie largely determined whether a society would follow the liberal democratic, fascist, or communist path to modernity. For decades, scholars have tested, refined, and contested this framework against diverse national histories, and Indonesia — an archipelagic nation of extraordinary demographic weight and political complexity — represents one of the most revealing and underexplored cases through which to revisit Moore's thesis. As Indonesia's democratic quality continues to be debated amid concerns about democratic backsliding, elite capture, and the persistence of oligarchic power, reassessing the historical-structural roots of its political trajectory is not merely an academic exercise but a task with real implications for understanding governance across Southeast Asia and the Global South more broadly.
Barrington Moore's central argument rested on the premise that no bourgeoisie, no democracy. The emergence of a strong, autonomous commercial class capable of wresting political concessions from landlords and monarchies was, for Moore, the precondition for liberal democracy. Where the bourgeoisie remained weak or was co-opted by the landed aristocracy, the result was fascism or authoritarian conservatism. Where peasant revolution succeeded in the absence of a bourgeois-led transition, the result was communist revolution. Applying this schema to Indonesia immediately reveals significant analytical tensions. The Dutch colonial economy cultivated an export-oriented plantation sector that deformed the development of an indigenous commercial bourgeoisie, instead creating a stratified colonial economy in which Chinese Indonesians played a distinctive intermediary role while the nationalist movement drew its energy from a Javanese administrative and intellectual stratum rather than a propertied class. Independence in 1945 inaugurated not a bourgeois republic but a postcolonial state in which the military, the bureaucracy, and competing political parties — including the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) — vied for primacy. Moore's framework, calibrated for the histories of England, France, Germany, the United States, China, and India, must be substantially retuned to account for this colonial inheritance and its particular class distortions.
The trajectory from Sukarno's Guided Democracy to the Suharto New Order (1966–1998) and then to Reformasi represents a compressed and turbulent passage through the very outcomes Moore sought to explain. The 1965–66 transition, in which the Indonesian military under Suharto presided over the destruction of the PKI and the liquidation of leftist agrarian organizing, effectively foreclosed the communist pathway and inaugurated a developmental authoritarian order built on a specific class coalition: the military as institutional backbone, a technocratic economic elite integrated into the state apparatus, and a subordinated domestic business class dependent on political patronage. What Moore's framework helps illuminate here is the importance of the agrarian question — the PKI had been organizing among Javanese landless peasants, and its annihilation was in part a counter-agrarian-reform project carried out with the tacit blessing of rural landlord interests. At the same time, the nature of Suharto's authoritarianism defies easy categorization within Moore's original typology. It was neither the fascism of an alliance between old landed elites and a middle class fearing proletarian revolution, nor the communism of peasant revolution under vanguard leadership. It was, rather, a form of military-led bureaucratic authoritarianism more characteristic of what later scholars would call the developmental state model, with echoes of the East Asian authoritarian developmental experiences of South Korea and Taiwan.
The democratization that followed the 1997–98 financial crisis and Suharto's fall offers equally instructive material for a Moorean reading. The transition was not driven by an autonomous bourgeoisie asserting democratic rights but by a confluence of student protests, elite fragmentation within the ruling coalition, and the withdrawal of military support for a regime that had become economically and politically unsustainable. What emerged was a procedural democracy grafted onto an oligarchic socioeconomic structure, in which former New Order elites, regional power brokers, and business conglomerates retained substantial influence over the new political terrain. Scholars of Indonesian democratization such as Richard Robison, Vedi Hadiz, and Jeffrey Winters have argued persuasively that Indonesian democracy has been colonized by oligarchic interests rather than genuinely transformed, a finding that resonates with Moore's deeper concern not merely with formal regime type but with the underlying class configurations that determine who benefits from and who is excluded by political arrangements. The weakness of organized labor, the fragmented peasantry, and the absence of a cohesive reformist middle class as an independent political actor all point to the structural constraints that Moore's framework, properly extended, would predict.
The broader significance of revisiting Moore through the Indonesian lens extends well beyond area studies. As democratic erosion has become a global concern — evident in the trajectories of Hungary, Brazil, the Philippines, and India, among others — the structural-historical tradition that Moore inaugurated offers a corrective to purely institutional or procedural accounts of democratic consolidation and fragility. If democracy requires not just constitutions and elections but a particular configuration of class power, then the persistence of oligarchic economies and the weakness of redistributive coalitions in many middle-income democracies suggests structural rather than merely institutional remedies. For ODA practitioners and development policy analysts, this has direct implications: investments in electoral infrastructure or anti-corruption agencies that leave underlying patterns of land tenure, labor precarity, and capital concentration untouched may produce procedural democracies without democratic substance. Indonesia's experience suggests that the quality of democracy is inseparable from the social question — the distribution of economic power and the organizational capacity of subordinate classes to contest elite prerogatives.
Looking forward, Indonesia's democratic trajectory will be shaped by forces that Moore could not have anticipated but whose logic his framework helps illuminate. The consolidation of Prabowo Subianto's presidency following the 2024 election raises questions about the resilience of democratic norms in an environment where the military's historical role as a political actor has never been fully resolved, and where dynastic political arrangements — symbolized by Joko Widodo's son securing the vice-presidential slot — suggest the reproduction of elite networks across regime changes. At the same time, the growth of a large urban service economy, the expansion of digital connectivity, and the emergence of new forms of civil society activism point to evolving class configurations that may, over the medium term, generate new coalitional possibilities. For researchers and policy professionals working on governance, democratization, and political economy in Asia, the invitation to return to Moore is ultimately an invitation to take seriously the long historical arc of class formation, colonial legacies, and agrarian transformation — forces whose consequences play out across generations and cannot be addressed by electoral observation missions or short-term governance reforms alone. Indonesia remains, in this sense, one of the most consequential and theoretically productive laboratories for understanding the conditions under which democracy is built, sustained, eroded, or transformed in the twenty-first century.