Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-08
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Political development in Southeast Asia has re-entered the center of comparative politics debates as Indonesia, the region's largest democracy and third-largest in the world, faces mounting pressures on its post-1998 constitutional order — creeping illiberalism, oligarchic capture of party politics, and a resurgent military role in civilian governance under the Prabowo administration. Against this backdrop, the publication of "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore" in the Journal of Contemporary Asia arrives at a timely moment. By invoking Barrington Moore Jr.'s landmark 1966 study, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, the article signals an ambition to move beyond short-term electoral analysis and instead situate Indonesia's turbulent twentieth- and twenty-first-century trajectory within a longue-durée framework concerned with class coalitions, agrarian transformation, and the structural preconditions for democratic or authoritarian outcomes. This is a significant intervention for a field that has, in recent decades, tended to favor institutionalist and rational-choice explanations of regime change over the kind of historical-structural analysis Moore pioneered.
Moore's original thesis held that the political character of a modernizing state — whether it tends toward parliamentary democracy, reactionary fascism, or communist revolution — is shaped decisively by the class alliances forged during the commercialization of agriculture and the accompanying weakening or persistence of a landed aristocracy. Applying this lens to Indonesia is analytically fertile precisely because the country does not map neatly onto any of Moore's three canonical routes. Indonesia's colonial political economy under Dutch rule produced neither a strong independent bourgeoisie of the English type nor a labor-repressive landlord class comparable to Prussian Junkers, but rather a plantation-and-extraction economy overlaid on a peasant smallholder base, later complicated by the rise of a state-centered military-bureaucratic class after independence. An article that takes Moore seriously as an analytical starting point rather than a rigid template would need to grapple with how Indonesia's mass violence of 1965–66, the consolidation of Suharto's New Order, and the subsequent democratic opening after 1998 either confirm, complicate, or productively break Moore's causal chain linking class structure to regime type — a question of considerable theoretical stakes given how influential the Moore framework remains in comparative historical sociology.
This kind of retrospective theory-testing connects directly to broader currents in the study of civil society and political economy across the Global South, where scholars have long debated whether classical modernization and class-coalition theories developed from European and North American cases travel well to postcolonial contexts shaped by external capital, Cold War intervention, and compressed or interrupted industrialization. Indonesia is an especially instructive case for IOCSS's broader research agenda on democratic backsliding and civil society resilience because its post-Suharto reformasi period produced one of the more robust electoral democracies in the developing world, only to now exhibit symptoms — weakened horizontal accountability, a securitized state apparatus reasserting itself in civilian affairs, and a business-political elite that has absorbed rather than been displaced by democratization — that a Moore-inflected analysis would interpret as the unfinished or incomplete transformation of the underlying class coalition. Rather than a clean transition "completed" in 1998, the persistence of oligarchic and military-linked economic interests suggests that the social forces Moore identified as decisive — an autonomous commercial or industrial bourgeoisie capable of underwriting liberal political institutions — never fully consolidated in the Indonesian case, leaving democratic institutions resting on a shallower social foundation than comparable East Asian democratizers such as South Korea or Taiwan.
The policy and research implications of this line of inquiry extend well beyond area studies. For donors, multilateral institutions, and civil society organizations engaged in democracy-support and governance programming in Indonesia and similar middle-income democracies, a structural class-based reading cautions against overreliance on institutional design fixes — electoral system reform, anti-corruption commissions, decentralization — that leave underlying elite coalitions untouched. If the durability of democratic governance is a function of which social classes hold political leverage rather than merely which formal rules govern political competition, then civil society strengthening efforts aimed at building autonomous labor organizations, independent business associations, and a genuinely pluralistic media and NGO sector deserve to be weighted at least as heavily as technocratic institutional reform in ODA-funded governance portfolios. This has direct relevance for how bilateral and multilateral development agencies calibrate democracy and governance assistance in Southeast Asia, where the temptation to treat democratic consolidation as primarily a legal-institutional achievement risks underestimating the socioeconomic substructure that Moore's tradition insists must also be addressed.
Looking forward, the revival of Moore's framework in a contemporary Indonesian context should prompt researchers to extend similar structural analysis to other cases of democratic stress in the region — the Philippines, Thailand, and Myanmar each present distinct configurations of landed, military, and commercial class power that would benefit from comparable treatment. For practitioners, the article's implicit warning is that formal democratic architecture can persist for decades atop an unreformed class settlement, producing exactly the kind of hollowed-out, oligarchic democracy that now characterizes much of the region. As Indonesia navigates a period of renewed military assertiveness and elite consolidation under its current government, scholars and civil society actors alike would do well to revisit not only Moore's specific typology but his underlying methodological insistence that democracy's survival cannot be understood apart from the distribution of economic power that underwrites it — a lesson with clear resonance for IOCSS's continuing work on the political economy of civic space and democratic resilience across the developing world.