Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-03
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of why some societies arrive at liberal democracy while others cycle through various forms of authoritarianism has occupied comparative political scientists for decades, yet it retains urgent contemporary relevance. Across Southeast Asia and the broader developing world, the post-Cold War optimism that liberal democratic norms would gradually consolidate has given way to a more sobering assessment: democratic gains are neither linear nor irreversible. Indonesia, the world's third-largest democracy and the largest Muslim-majority nation, offers one of the most instructive cases for examining these dynamics. The recent article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, revisiting the Indonesian case through the analytical lens of Barrington Moore's landmark comparative sociology, arrives at a moment when Indonesia's democratic trajectory is again under serious scholarly and policy scrutiny. By returning to foundational theoretical frameworks in historical sociology, the article invites researchers and practitioners alike to ask not merely what happened but why structural forces made particular political outcomes more or less probable.
Barrington Moore's 1966 masterwork, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, constructed a comparative historical argument about the class coalitions and agrarian transformations that shaped the political development of major nations. His famous dictum — "no bourgeoisie, no democracy" — encapsulated a structural argument: the political empowerment of an independent commercial and industrial class, willing and able to challenge landed aristocracies and the state, was a precondition for liberal parliamentary democracy. Where landlords maintained dominance over a subordinate peasantry and forged coalitions with emerging state bureaucracies rather than commercial classes, fascism or conservative authoritarianism tended to prevail. Where peasant revolts occurred in the context of weak landed classes and revolutionary vanguard parties, communist revolutions resulted. Moore's framework was deliberately schematic, designed to capture macro-level structural patterns rather than the contingencies of individual political actors. Applying this framework to Indonesia is thus both intellectually productive and analytically demanding, given the country's distinctive colonial inheritance, its fragmented agrarian structure, and the unusual prominence of the military as an autonomous political actor throughout much of its post-independence history.
Indonesia's political history offers a remarkably compressed demonstration of multiple Moorean pathways operating in rapid succession within a single national context. The Sukarno era of Guided Democracy in the late 1950s and early 1960s represented an attempt to navigate between competing class and ideological forces — the military, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), Islamic organizations, and a nascent nationalist bourgeoisie — through a form of elite balancing that ultimately proved unsustainable. The violent transition of 1965-66, in which the PKI was annihilated and Sukarno displaced by General Suharto, restructured Indonesian politics along lines that Moore would have recognized: a coalition between military elites, international capital, and a technocratic state apparatus that suppressed organized labor and peasant mobilization while facilitating export-oriented industrialization. The New Order that followed was not simply personal dictatorship but a structured authoritarian arrangement that deliberately managed class formation, limiting autonomous bourgeois political organization even as it fostered economic growth. This is precisely the kind of case that complicates the straightforward Moore thesis: economic development occurred, a middle class emerged, but the political conditions for democratic consolidation remained constrained by the very institutional arrangements that had generated growth.
The Reformasi transition of 1998 appeared at first to vindicate those who argued that rising middle classes and civil society organizations would eventually press successfully for democratic opening. Suharto's fall under the combined pressure of economic crisis, student protest, and elite defection seemed to confirm a modified Moorean narrative in which a sufficiently empowered urban bourgeoisie, even one formed under authoritarian auspices, could eventually generate democratic pressure. Two decades later, however, the assessment is far more complicated. Indonesia has maintained electoral democracy and competitive multiparty politics, but institutional quality — judicial independence, press freedom, protection of civil liberties, accountability of security forces — has shown troubling signs of erosion. The consolidation of political power around oligarchic networks, the persistence of military influence in civilian affairs, and the weakness of programmatic political parties all suggest that the structural conditions for robust democratic deepening remain contested. Revisiting Moore at this juncture is analytically valuable precisely because it shifts attention from procedural democracy toward the underlying class configurations and institutional inheritances that determine whether electoral competition translates into meaningful popular sovereignty.
The broader significance of this kind of historically grounded comparative analysis extends well beyond the Indonesian case. For the international development and ODA community, there is a persistent temptation to treat democratization as a technical governance challenge amenable to programmatic intervention — election monitoring, judicial training, civil society capacity building. Moore's framework, and the Indonesian evidence examined through it, counsels against such optimism. Political institutions are deeply embedded in social structures, and those structures are shaped by long historical processes of colonialism, class formation, and capital accumulation that no project cycle can rapidly transform. Indonesia's pathway illustrates that democratic transitions can occur without the prior consolidation of a politically autonomous bourgeoisie, but that in such cases democracy remains vulnerable to reconsolidation by elite networks with the organizational capacity and resource base to shape electoral outcomes and weaken accountability institutions. This does not mean that external support for democratic institutions is futile, but it does argue for a more structurally informed approach — one that attends to questions of property rights, labor organization, and the political economy of oligarchy rather than focusing exclusively on procedural electoral mechanics.
Looking forward, the Indonesian case and its Moorean reading carry important implications both for regional comparativists and for those engaged in democracy support programming across the developing world. As Indonesia navigates its post-Jokowi political moment under President Prabowo Subianto — a figure whose career spans both the authoritarian New Order and the democratic Reformasi era — the structural tensions that Moore's framework identifies will remain directly relevant. The question is whether the social forces capable of sustaining genuine democratic accountability — organized civil society, independent media, a politically assertive middle class, and rural populations with genuine access to political voice — can strengthen themselves relative to the oligarchic and military networks that have historically constrained Indonesian democracy from within. For researchers, this means continued attention to the political economy of inequality and class formation alongside the more conventionally studied variables of institutional design and elite behavior. For development practitioners, it suggests that democracy support must engage seriously with questions of economic power and civil society autonomy rather than treating political and economic reform as separable domains. Moore wrote in 1966 that "the road to democracy has been rough and by no means straight." Indonesia's experience in the six decades since confirms that assessment, and the scholarly return to his framework represents a valuable corrective to the more linear and proceduralist assumptions that have sometimes dominated both academic and policy discourse on democratic development.