Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-07
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of what drives societies toward democratic governance or authoritarian entrenchment has occupied comparative political scientists for decades, and Indonesia — the world's third-largest democracy and Southeast Asia's most populous nation — presents one of the most instructive cases for examining that question. Recent scholarship revisiting Barrington Moore's foundational framework in the context of Indonesian political development offers a timely opportunity to reassess the structural determinants of regime change, particularly as democratic backsliding accelerates across much of the Indo-Pacific and as international donors recalibrate their assumptions about the relationship between development assistance and political liberalization. Indonesia's own trajectory — from colonial subjugation, through the violent authoritarianism of the New Order, to the extraordinary democratic opening of the Reformasi era — constitutes both a test case and a challenge to the prevailing theoretical paradigms that have guided development policy and civil society support programming for a generation.
Barrington Moore's 1966 masterwork, "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy," argued that the political form a modernizing society takes depends fundamentally on the class coalitions that emerge during the transition from agrarian to industrial economies. His now-famous typology identified three routes: the bourgeois-democratic path exemplified by England, France, and the United States; the conservative-revolutionary path toward fascism characteristic of Germany and Japan; and the peasant-driven communist revolution that defined China and Russia. The core insight — that the relative power of landed elites, commercial bourgeoisies, and rural peasantries shapes the institutional possibilities available to political actors — was rooted in a structural materialism that subsequent scholars have both refined and contested. Applying this lens to Indonesia requires significant theoretical adaptation, not least because Indonesia's path was shaped by a colonial agrarian economy of a very different kind than Moore's European and East Asian cases, and because the role of the military as a quasi-autonomous political class complicates any straightforward mapping onto Moore's class categories.
Indonesia's political history from independence in 1945 through the collapse of Suharto's New Order in 1998 illustrates the complexity that comparative historical sociology must grapple with when moving beyond the cases Moore originally examined. The plantation agriculture and extractive resource economy that the Dutch colonial system bequeathed to the Indonesian republic produced a rural class structure that was neither the independent yeomanry of the English case nor the serf-dependent aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France. The massacres of 1965 and 1966 — in which an estimated half-million to one million people, many of them peasants affiliated with the Indonesian Communist Party, were killed following the alleged coup attempt — demonstrated how rural class conflict, mediated through Cold War geopolitics and military institutional interests, could consolidate authoritarian rule with devastating efficiency. Suharto's New Order then systematically demobilized civil society, incorporated the peasantry through patronage and surveillance, and built its legitimacy through export-led growth and the managed distribution of oil revenues — a developmental authoritarianism that deferred, rather than eliminated, the structural pressures toward political change. When those pressures finally erupted in the economic crisis of 1997 to 1998, the coalition that forced Suharto from power included urban middle classes, students, Islamic organizations, and labor movements — a configuration that Moore's framework would need to be substantially modified to accommodate.
The Reformasi period that followed Suharto's fall produced one of the most rapid and extensive democratic transitions in modern history, and it has since attracted sustained scholarly attention precisely because it confounds the pessimistic expectations that many structural theorists held for the region. Indonesia decentralized political authority, held successive free and competitive elections, constructed independent judicial and anti-corruption institutions, and nurtured a vibrant civil society sector that became a major recipient of foreign development assistance from bilateral and multilateral donors. Yet the sustainability of that democratic settlement has been increasingly questioned, particularly following the presidency of Joko Widodo, whose tenure saw the erosion of civil liberties, the political marginalization of reformist civil society voices, the entrenchment of oligarchic economic power, and the quiet rehabilitation of military and intelligence actors who had been sidelined during the initial Reformasi years. Revisiting Moore's framework in this context allows scholars to ask whether what was achieved in 1998 was a genuine structural transformation of Indonesia's political economy, or whether it represented a more superficial institutional reshaping that left the underlying class coalitions and resource extraction logics of the New Order largely intact.
For development practitioners and ODA policymakers, the analytical implications are considerable. The international donor community invested heavily in Indonesian civil society and democratic governance programming throughout the 2000s and 2010s, operating on the premise that a sufficiently empowered civil society sector could serve as both a watchdog against authoritarian backsliding and a vehicle for deepening citizen participation. Moore's framework, and the scholarship that extends it to the Indonesian case, suggests that this logic may be insufficient without attending to the structural economic conditions that determine whether civil society organizations can sustain independent pressure on state actors or are instead absorbed into clientelistic networks and patronage circuits. The resurgence of oligarchic power in Indonesian politics — and the evidence that many civil society organizations have been coopted, marginalized, or simply outspent by elite actors — should prompt a fundamental reassessment of how governance-focused ODA is designed and targeted, and whether the absence of structural economic reform leaves democratic institutions perpetually vulnerable to elite capture.
Looking forward, Indonesia's trajectory will be shaped by a confluence of pressures that neither Moore nor his immediate successors could fully anticipate: the digital transformation of political mobilization and surveillance, the integration of the Indonesian economy into Chinese-led regional infrastructure financing, the climate crisis reshaping the extractive political economy of resource-dependent provinces, and the ongoing contest within Islam between democratic and theocratic political projects. Scholars working in the Moorean tradition will need to grapple with how these new structural variables interact with the class coalitions and institutional legacies that earlier generations identified as determinative. For the international research community focused on ODA effectiveness and civil society sustainability, Indonesia remains a critical case — not because it offers easy lessons, but because its combination of democratic achievement, structural fragility, and geopolitical salience makes it an indispensable laboratory for understanding the conditions under which democratic governance either consolidates or retreats. The enduring value of revisiting Barrington Moore in this context lies precisely in his insistence that political outcomes are not random, not merely the product of elite decisions, and not reducible to international influences alone — they emerge from the deep logic of how societies organize economic life and distribute the power that flows from it.