Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-12
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Indonesia's political trajectory has long presented a puzzle for scholars of comparative democratization: a nation of extraordinary social and religious diversity that has cycled through parliamentary democracy, authoritarian "Guided Democracy," a brutal military-backed dictatorship under Suharto's New Order, and, since 1998, one of the world's largest and most closely watched experiments in post-authoritarian democratic consolidation. That experiment now faces renewed scrutiny. Under President Prabowo Subianto — a former general with a documented history in the repressive apparatus of the New Order — many observers have voiced concern about creeping militarization of civilian institutions, the erosion of anti-corruption bodies, and the narrowing of civil society space. Against this backdrop, revisiting Barrington Moore's classic structural theory of regime formation, as this Journal of Contemporary Asia article does, is not an antiquarian exercise. It is an attempt to ask whether the deep class coalitions Moore identified as the drivers of democratic or authoritarian outcomes in early modern Europe, Asia, and North America can still explain, six decades later, why some post-colonial states consolidate democracy while others revert to strongman rule.
Moore's 1966 study, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, argued that the political destiny of agrarian societies undergoing modernization was shaped by the relative strength of the landed aristocracy, the commercializing bourgeoisie, and the peasantry, and by the alliances these classes formed with the state. Where a vigorous bourgeoisie broke the power of a landed elite, parliamentary democracy tended to follow; where landlords and industrialists forged a conservative coalition against labor and peasant mobilization while relying on the state to suppress dissent, the result was reactionary "revolution from above" culminating in fascism; and where peasant revolution destroyed the landlord class altogether, communist dictatorship emerged. Applying this framework to Indonesia — a case Moore himself did not treat in detail — requires grappling with distinctive features absent from his European and East Asian cases: a colonial legacy of extractive plantation agriculture under Dutch rule, an ethnically and religiously plural society without a single dominant landed aristocracy, and a postcolonial military that emerged not merely as an instrument of class rule but as an autonomous political actor with its own territorial command structure and economic interests. The article's central contribution, in engaging Moore's comparative-historical method, is likely to interrogate how Indonesia's weak indigenous bourgeoisie, the political salience of Chinese-Indonesian capital, and the army's dual function as both economic actor and security guarantor complicate a model built on European class dynamics — while still testing whether Moore's underlying insight, that democratic durability depends on which coalition captures the state during critical junctures of agrarian transformation, retains explanatory power.
This inquiry resonates with broader currents in the study of regime change and civil society across the Global South. Scholars working in the tradition of comparative political economy have increasingly returned to structural, class-based explanations after decades in which modernization theory and institutionalist accounts of democratic transition dominated the field. The renewed interest reflects dissatisfaction with purely procedural or agency-centered accounts of democratization — accounts that emphasize elite pacts, electoral engineering, or international democracy-promotion programming — which have struggled to explain the wave of democratic backsliding now visible from Hungary and Turkey to the Philippines, Thailand, and, arguably, Indonesia itself. A Moore-inspired framework redirects attention to the underlying distribution of economic power: who owns land and capital, how oligarchic wealth is reproduced through political office, and how coalitions between business elites, the security establishment, and populist mass constituencies are assembled or dissolved. For Indonesia specifically, this lens illuminates the durability of oligarchic capture even through the Reformasi period — the persistence of predatory rent-seeking networks first consolidated under Suharto, now redistributed across a decentralized system of provincial and district-level patronage, and the recurring pattern by which nominally democratic elections become vehicles for elite factions to legitimate continued oligarchic dominance rather than genuine popular accountability.
For the community of ODA and development practitioners, the implications are significant. Donor governments and multilateral agencies have historically approached Indonesia's democratic institutions — election commissions, anti-corruption agencies, decentralized local government — as technical objects amenable to capacity-building and governance-reform programming. A structural class analysis of the Moore variety suggests these interventions address symptoms rather than causes: unless programming grapples with the underlying coalition of landed, extractive, and security interests that continues to shape Indonesian political economy, technocratic democracy-support initiatives risk being absorbed into, rather than disrupting, existing patterns of elite capture. This has direct relevance for how civil society organizations frame their advocacy, since it implies that anti-corruption and human rights campaigns focused solely on individual malfeasance may achieve less durable change than efforts aimed at the structural bases of oligarchic power, such as land reform, corporate transparency, and the demilitarization of local economic life. It also carries a methodological lesson for area-studies scholarship: single-country studies benefit substantially from being placed within long-run, cross-regional comparative frameworks, since patterns that appear idiosyncratically "Indonesian" — military business interests, ethnic-Chinese capital's political vulnerability, agrarian dispossession in the outer islands — often have structural analogues across Southeast Asia and beyond.
Looking forward, the value of returning to Barrington Moore lies less in reproducing his specific typology than in reviving his method: tracing regime outcomes to the historical formation and political alliances of social classes rather than treating democracy or authoritarianism as the product of institutional design alone. As Indonesia navigates a period in which military figures once again occupy the pinnacle of civilian government, researchers and practitioners alike would do well to ask not simply whether formal democratic procedures survive, but which coalitions of capital, land, and coercive power stand behind them. Future scholarship building on this article's approach might extend the analysis to comparative cases across the region — the Philippines, Thailand, and Myanmar chief among them — to assess whether a revised, post-colonial variant of Moore's framework can account for the recurring susceptibility of Southeast Asian democracies to oligarchic and militarized backsliding, and what structural interventions, as opposed to procedural safeguards, might interrupt that pattern.