Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-10
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Indonesia's political trajectory over the past six decades presents one of the most instructive cases in comparative politics for testing classical theories of regime formation, and the reappearance of Barrington Moore's framework in recent scholarship on the country is a timely reminder that the old questions about who drives democratization and who forecloses it have never been fully settled. Moore's 1966 thesis, developed in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, argued that the class configurations accompanying the commercialization of agriculture—specifically the strength or weakness of an independent bourgeoisie, the fate of the landed aristocracy, and the political trajectory of the peasantry—determined whether a society moved toward parliamentary democracy, fascism, or communist revolution. Applying this framework to Indonesia, a nation whose modern history includes anticolonial revolution, a bloody transition to authoritarianism in 1965-66, three decades of Suharto's New Order, and a post-1998 democratic transition that has since shown signs of oligarchic entrenchment, offers a rich empirical terrain for revisiting Moore's categories and testing their portability beyond the European and East Asian cases he originally examined. At a moment when democratic backsliding is a global preoccupation and scholars are again asking whether economic development reliably produces political liberalization, returning to a structural, class-based account of regime trajectories is more than an academic exercise; it speaks directly to debates about whether Southeast Asia's current wave of illiberalism is a contingent political failure or the expression of deeper socioeconomic continuities.
The core analytical value of applying Moore to Indonesia lies in the country's unusual class structure, one that never produced the kind of assertive, politically independent bourgeoisie that Moore identified as the linchpin of democratic outcomes in England, France, and the United States. Indonesia's commercial class has historically been fragmented along ethnic lines, with a economically significant but politically vulnerable Chinese-Indonesian merchant community operating alongside a state-dependent pribumi business elite that owed its fortunes to political patronage rather than autonomous capital accumulation. This absence of a "bourgeois impulse" toward liberal constitutionalism helps explain why Indonesia's path diverged sharply from Moore's classic liberal-democratic route and instead resembled, in modified form, the coalition of state bureaucrats, military officers, and landed or agribusiness interests that Moore associated with authoritarian modernization from above. The New Order's development strategy, which combined authoritarian political control with market-oriented growth and systematic co-optation of capital, is legible in Moore's terms as a case where the bourgeoisie's weakness left the state and military as the dominant modernizing agents, a pattern echoing Moore's discussion of Germany and Japan's "revolution from above" rather than the classic English or French bourgeois revolutions.
Yet the Indonesian case also complicates Moore's framework in productive ways, particularly regarding the peasantry and the post-1998 transition. Moore treated the peasantry's political disposition—whether it remained a conservative, land-hungry bloc susceptible to right-wing mobilization or was destroyed and absorbed into urban wage labor—as decisive for whether reactionary or revolutionary outcomes prevailed. Indonesia's rural class relations, shaped by the Green Revolution, transmigration policies, and the New Order's corporatist control of peasant organizations through instruments like the village cooperative system, defused the kind of agrarian radicalism that had fueled the 1965-66 violence against the Communist Party and its rural base. The democratization that followed Suharto's fall in 1998 was not driven by an ascendant bourgeoisie demanding political rights commensurate with its economic power, as Moore's model would predict, but by a convergence of urban middle-class protest, elite defection, and economic crisis—a pattern that scholars working in the Moore tradition have had to stretch considerably to accommodate. This suggests that Indonesia's democratic opening was less a structural inevitability of class development than a contingent political rupture, one that has since allowed old oligarchic networks, many rooted in New Order-era patronage, to reconstitute themselves within nominally democratic institutions.
This tension between formal democratization and persistent oligarchic control situates the Indonesian case within a broader regional and global pattern that should concern anyone studying ODA, civil society, and political economy in the Global South. Across much of Southeast Asia, and indeed in many aid-dependent democracies, formal electoral competition has proven compatible with the survival of entrenched economic elites who adapt to democratic rules without relinquishing structural power—a dynamic visible in the Philippines, Thailand, and increasingly in parts of Africa where donor-supported democratic consolidation has not dislodged patrimonial economic networks. For civil society organizations and development institutions that have long treated democratization as a linear outcome of economic growth and middle-class expansion, the Moore-inflected reading of Indonesia is a caution against assuming that GDP growth or the emergence of a business class will automatically translate into liberal political outcomes; the character and cohesion of that class, and its relationship to the state, matter far more than its mere existence.
The policy and research implications of this line of inquiry are substantial. For development agencies and donors calibrating governance-support programming, the lesson is that strengthening civil society and electoral institutions without attending to the underlying distribution of economic power risks producing what some scholars have called "illiberal democracy" or "oligarchic democracy"—systems that satisfy procedural benchmarks while leaving substantive accountability weak. For comparative political economists, Indonesia's case argues for a revival of structural class analysis at a time when much of the democratization literature has drifted toward institutionalist or agency-centered explanations that underplay the weight of historical class formation. Researchers at institutions like IOCSS, engaged in tracking how ODA and civil society support interact with domestic political economy, would do well to treat the Moore framework not as a rigid predictive model but as a diagnostic lens for asking which social coalitions actually benefit from, and defend, a given country's institutional arrangements.
Looking forward, the renewed engagement with Moore's thesis through the Indonesian case invites both practitioners and scholars to resist premature closure on the "developmental democratization" narrative that dominated post-Cold War thinking about aid and governance. As Indonesia navigates continued tension between its formally robust electoral democracy and the informal persistence of oligarchic, military, and dynastic power—visible in ongoing debates over anti-corruption enforcement, land and resource governance, and the political dominance of business-linked family networks—the analytical question Moore posed sixty years ago remains alive: which class coalitions are being empowered by current patterns of economic and political development, and toward what kind of regime are they likely to lead? For researchers, this argues for continued comparative work linking agrarian and capital class formation to regime trajectories across Southeast Asia; for practitioners in the aid and civil-society space, it argues for a more class-conscious diagnostic when designing governance and democracy-support interventions, one that asks not simply whether institutions are democratic in form, but which social forces they actually serve.