Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-11
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Indonesia's political trajectory since the fall of Suharto in 1998 continues to pose one of the most consequential puzzles in comparative politics: how does a vast, ethnically fragmented, resource-dependent archipelago move from decades of authoritarian rule toward a competitive, if imperfect, electoral democracy, and why does that democracy remain vulnerable to backsliding? This question has taken on renewed urgency amid a global "democratic recession" in which several middle-income states once celebrated as post-authoritarian success stories—Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines, and arguably Indonesia itself under recent policing and civil-society crackdowns—have drifted toward illiberal or hybrid regimes. Against this backdrop, the article "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore," published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, revisits one of the foundational texts of comparative historical sociology, Barrington Moore Jr.'s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), to ask whether its class-coalition framework still illuminates the Indonesian case six decades after its publication and nearly three decades into Indonesia's post-authoritarian experiment.
Moore's original thesis held that the political destination of agrarian societies undergoing modernization—liberal democracy, fascism, or communist revolution—was shaped by the relative strength of the landed aristocracy, the commercial bourgeoisie, and the peasantry, and by the specific coalition that emerged between these classes as commercial agriculture penetrated the countryside. His famous dictum, "no bourgeoisie, no democracy," placed the autonomous strength of a capitalist middle class at the center of any successful democratic transition. Applying this framework to Indonesia is analytically fraught precisely because Indonesia does not fit the classic European or even the East Asian mold that inspired Moore's typology: its transition from Dutch colonial extraction to Sukarno-era nationalist populism, to Suharto's military-backed New Order developmentalism, and finally to post-1998 electoral democracy, was driven less by an indigenous bourgeoisie confronting a landed aristocracy than by a fusion of military power, state-linked capital (often ethnic-Chinese conglomerates operating under political patronage), and a large, politically mobilizable peasantry and urban poor. The article's project of testing Moore's categories against this trajectory illuminates both the enduring explanatory power and the significant limits of a framework built primarily on English, French, American, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian cases.
What makes this exercise more than an academic curiosity is that Indonesia has functioned, in the literature on Southeast Asian political economy, as a paradigmatic case of "money politics" and oligarchic democracy—terms associated with scholars such as Richard Robison, Vedi Hadiz, and Jeffrey Winters, who argue that Indonesia's democratization did not dismantle the predatory coalitions of capital and coercion built under the New Order but rather allowed them to reorganize themselves within electoral institutions. A Moore-inflected reading would ask whether this outcome reflects the absence of an autonomous bourgeois class capable of demanding liberal constitutionalism on its own terms, and whether the peasantry's political incorporation through populist and Islamist mobilization—rather than its "labor-repressive" subordination, as in Moore's fascist pathway, or its revolutionary alliance with urban radicals, as in his communist pathway—produced a hybrid trajectory that classical modernization theory could not have anticipated. This matters for the broader ODA and development studies literature because donor governments and multilateral institutions have historically treated middle-class growth and private-sector expansion as near-automatic drivers of democratic consolidation; Indonesia's experience, filtered through a Moore-style class analysis, suggests instead that the political character of capital—whether it is autonomous, rent-dependent, or fused with the security apparatus—matters far more than its aggregate size.
The regional and global resonance of this argument extends well beyond Indonesia. Across much of the Global South, the post-Cold War wave of democratization was frequently narrated, particularly within USAID, World Bank, and OECD-DAC governance programming, as a function of economic liberalization producing a property-owning middle class that would, in Moore's terms, demand accountable government. Cases as varied as Thailand's cycle of coups and elections, Cambodia's consolidation of one-party dominance despite decades of donor-funded civil-society support, and Myanmar's aborted transition all suggest that where capitalist development remains entangled with military or crony networks rather than generating an independent bourgeois political actor, electoral institutions can coexist indefinitely with oligarchic or even re-authoritarian outcomes. Indonesia is distinctive chiefly in having sustained competitive elections and a relatively open civil society for longer than most of its neighbors, making it a crucial test case for whether formal democratic durability can mask a deeper continuity of class power—a question with direct implications for how development agencies and civil-society funders assess "democratic consolidation" versus mere institutional survival.
For researchers and practitioners in the ODA and governance-assistance space, the policy implication is a call for greater analytical humility about the causal chain from economic growth to democratic deepening. Programs that fund middle-class civil-society organizations, anti-corruption bodies, or electoral administration on the assumption that these will cumulatively produce liberal-democratic outcomes may need to grapple with the possibility that, absent shifts in the underlying coalition of capital, coercion, and rural political mobilization, such interventions primarily reshape the terrain on which oligarchic competition occurs rather than transforming its logic. Looking forward, this article's re-engagement with Moore invites a fuller research agenda examining how digital-era populism, environmental and resource politics (notably around palm oil and nickel extraction), and the reassertion of military influence in Indonesian civilian politics under the current administration might constitute a genuinely new pathway that Moore's mid-twentieth-century categories only partially anticipate. For IOCSS and its research community, the enduring lesson is that comparative historical frameworks remain indispensable diagnostic tools precisely because their frictions with contemporary cases—rather than their easy confirmations—are what generate the sharpest insights into the political economy of democratization in the Global South today.