Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-08-11
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The question of what conditions enable or foreclose democratic governance has occupied comparative politics for decades, yet it has acquired renewed urgency as scholars and practitioners watch democratic norms erode in countries long considered on a consolidating trajectory. Indonesia, the world's largest archipelagic nation and its third-largest democracy by population, sits at the center of this contemporary anxiety. With a presidential transition in late 2024 bringing to power Prabowo Subianto — a former special forces commander implicated in human rights abuses during the New Order era — the structural questions raised by Barrington Moore's foundational 1966 work, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, feel less like historical archaeology and more like living diagnostics. A new article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia revisits Moore's comparative-historical framework precisely in order to ask what the Indonesian case teaches us about the deep class and agrarian foundations of political regime type, and what it illuminates about the fragility and durability of democratic gains.
Barrington Moore's central thesis, often condensed to the aphorism "no bourgeois, no democracy," argued that the pathway a society takes toward modern political order — liberal democracy, fascism, or peasant revolution — is determined less by elite ideological commitment than by the configuration of class relations that emerges from the transformation of agrarian economies. Where a commercially oriented bourgeoisie successfully broke the power of the landed aristocracy and forged an alliance with elements of the state, liberal democracy tended to result. Where the landed upper classes retained dominance and struck bargains with commercial elites to repress peasant labor, fascism or right-wing authoritarianism followed. And where an exploited peasantry eventually mobilized in the context of weak commercial development, communist or revolutionary outcomes emerged. Applying this schema to a postcolonial Southeast Asian state like Indonesia requires significant adaptation, not least because Dutch colonialism systematically distorted class formation, suppressed indigenous bourgeois development, and created a state apparatus oriented toward extraction rather than internal market integration. The article under review takes seriously both Moore's analytic power and its limits when confronted with the specificities of colonial and postcolonial political economy.
Indonesia's postcolonial trajectory is in many respects a laboratory for competing theories of democratization and authoritarian consolidation. The parliamentary democracy of the early 1950s gave way to Sukarno's Guided Democracy, which in turn was catastrophically interrupted by the 1965 coup and counter-coup, and the subsequent mass killings — likely between 500,000 and one million deaths — that eliminated the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and decimated rural labor movements. Suharto's New Order (1966–1998) then consolidated a form of capitalist authoritarianism deeply intertwined with military institutional interests, crony conglomerates, and a deliberately depoliticized peasantry. The article's Moorean reading of this trajectory invites attention to the particular class settlement that underwrote the New Order: a dependent bourgeoisie that benefited from state-mediated rent extraction rather than autonomous market competition, a military that had assumed a "dual function" (dwifungsi) as both security and socio-political actor, and a peasantry fragmented by Green Revolution policies that simultaneously raised rice yields and undercut collective rural organization. In Moore's terms, Indonesia's long authoritarian interlude reflected not the absence of capitalism but its specific colonial and postcolonial form — a capitalism that generated wealth without generating an autonomous commercial class capable of demanding accountable government.
The Reformasi transition of 1998, which followed the Asian financial crisis and Suharto's fall, did not resolve these structural conditions so much as work around them. Indonesia democratized rapidly and impressively by many institutional measures: competitive elections, press freedom, decentralization, civilian oversight of the military. Yet the article appears to probe whether this democratization represented a genuine transformation of the underlying class and institutional foundations Moore identified as consequential, or whether it produced what some scholars call a "democracy without democrats" — formal procedures without the social underpinnings that make those procedures durable under stress. The persistence of oligarchic economic concentration, the ongoing political relevance of military networks, the weakness of programmatic party organization, and the rise of patronage-based electoral mobilization all suggest that the Moorean conditions for consolidated liberal democracy remain incompletely satisfied. Jokowi's presidency demonstrated both the genuine popular aspirations embedded in Indonesian democracy and the system's susceptibility to dynastic maneuvering, as his controversial facilitation of his son's candidacy for vice president under Prabowo revealed structural vulnerabilities that formal institutional rules could not contain.
The broader significance of this kind of historically grounded, class-attentive analysis lies in what it contributes to the contemporary global conversation about democratic backsliding. Where much of the democratic backsliding literature focuses on proximate causes — populist leaders, polarization, institutional erosion — a Moorean approach insists on examining the deeper social and economic structures that either sustain or undermine democratic governance over time. For Indonesia, this means asking not only whether specific elections are competitive or specific officials are held accountable, but whether the configuration of agrarian, commercial, and military class interests is evolving in ways that make democracy more or less structurally stable. The answer, on current evidence, is ambiguous at best. Indonesia has not reversed its democratic transition in any formal sense, but the social foundations that would give that transition long-term resilience — an autonomous, organized bourgeoisie; a politically capable peasantry and labor movement; civilian institutional supremacy — remain contested and incomplete.
For practitioners working in ODA and civil society development, the implications are both sobering and generative. They are sobering because they suggest that democracy promotion efforts focused narrowly on elections, legal reform, or civil society capacity building may be operating on the surface of structures that run much deeper. An electoral observation mission or a grant to a transparency NGO does not alter the underlying class settlement that shapes who can effectively organize, who can fund political campaigns, and whose interests the state ultimately serves. But the analysis is also generative because it directs attention toward the kinds of structural interventions — land reform, labor rights, progressive taxation, genuine civilian control of the military — that historically have mattered for democratic consolidation. Future research would benefit from extending this Moorean lens to other Southeast Asian cases undergoing comparable tensions between formal democratization and structural authoritarianism, including Myanmar's tragic reversal, Thailand's persistent military tutelage, and the Philippines' recurrent strongman politics. Indonesia remains the region's most consequential democratic experiment, and understanding what sustains or threatens it requires exactly the kind of structural, historically informed analysis that engagement with Barrington Moore's framework continues to make possible.