Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-14
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
The global resurgence of authoritarian consolidation—from Southeast Asia's "democratic recession" to the broader erosion of liberal norms across the Global South—has renewed scholarly interest in the deep structural conditions that push nations toward dictatorship or democracy rather than treating regime type as a matter of elite choice or institutional design alone. It is within this context that a return to Barrington Moore's classic comparative-historical framework, articulated in his 1966 landmark Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, gains renewed relevance for understanding contemporary Indonesia. Indonesia occupies a particularly instructive position in this debate: it is simultaneously celebrated as Southeast Asia's most durable post-authoritarian democracy since the fall of Suharto in 1998, and increasingly flagged by comparative politics scholars as a case of democratic backsliding, oligarchic entrenchment, and the persistence of predatory political-economic networks inherited from the New Order. A study published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia that reexamines Indonesia's trajectory through the lens of Moore's framework therefore arrives at a moment when both area specialists and comparativists are searching for theoretical tools robust enough to explain not just democratic transitions but their fragility.
Moore's original thesis famously linked distinct pathways to political modernity—liberal democracy, fascism, and communist revolution—to the class alliances forged among landed elites, the bourgeoisie, and the peasantry during the commercialization of agriculture. His central insight, that "no bourgeoisie, no democracy," and his emphasis on the fate of the landed upper classes as decisive for regime outcomes, has long been criticized for its Eurocentric case selection and its relative neglect of state formation processes outside Western Europe, Japan, China, and the United States. Applying this framework to Indonesia forces a productive confrontation between Moore's mid-twentieth-century categories and the realities of a postcolonial, resource-dependent, and ethnically plural political economy shaped by Dutch colonial extraction, Cold War geopolitics, and later by extractive capitalism tied to palm oil, mining, and other commodity sectors. An article that takes seriously this application likely interrogates how Indonesia's landed and commercial elites—including the politico-business networks that flourished under Suharto's patrimonial authoritarianism—diverged from Moore's classical bourgeois or landlord classes, producing instead a hybrid oligarchy that has proven remarkably adaptable to both authoritarian rule and electoral democracy alike.
This line of inquiry resonates strongly with broader debates in the study of Southeast Asian and global political economy concerning the durability of oligarchic power under formally democratic institutions. Scholars such as Jeffrey Winters and Vedi Hadiz have long argued that Indonesia's post-1998 reformasi produced procedural democracy without a corresponding transformation of the underlying class structure, allowing New Order-era business and military elites to reconstitute their power through party financing, local patronage networks, and control over natural resource rents. A Moore-inspired reading complements this literature by asking a more structural question: whether the absence of a genuinely autonomous, reform-minded bourgeoisie in Indonesia's development—one capable of demanding accountable governance independent of state largesse—explains the persistence of illiberal practices such as vote-buying, dynastic politics, and the securitization of civil society space, even amid regular elections and a nominally free press. This matters greatly for the wider region, where similar oligarchic-democratic hybrids are visible in the Philippines, Thailand, and increasingly in parts of South Asia, suggesting that class-structural analysis retains explanatory power even in contexts far removed from Moore's original agrarian case studies.
The implications for development and civil society research extend well beyond academic debates over historical sociology. If Indonesia's democratic institutions rest on a shallow social foundation dominated by rent-seeking elites rather than a broad-based, autonomous middle class or organized labor movement, then donor and multilateral strategies premised on institutional strengthening—electoral assistance, judicial reform, anti-corruption capacity building—may address symptoms while leaving the underlying political economy of oligarchic capture untouched. This has direct relevance for ODA programming across Southeast Asia, where development partners have increasingly shifted rhetoric toward "good governance" and "resilient democracy" agendas without always grappling with the class coalitions that determine whether such reforms are implementable or merely cosmetic. Civil society organizations operating in this environment likewise face a structural constraint that transcends legal or regulatory obstacles: philanthropic and activist efforts to expand accountability compete against deeply embedded material interests that benefit from weak enforcement, informal deal-making, and the fusion of political and business power. Understanding this dynamic through Moore's comparative-historical lens offers a corrective to more voluntarist accounts of democratization that overemphasize leadership, constitutional design, or international pressure as sufficient conditions for consolidating liberal governance.
Looking forward, this scholarship invites both historical sociologists and Southeast Asianists to refine rather than discard Moore's framework, treating it as a starting point for theorizing hybrid and non-Western pathways to political order rather than a rigid template requiring wholesale rejection. For researchers, the task ahead involves generating comparable class-structural analyses across other post-authoritarian Asian states to determine whether Indonesia's oligarchic-democratic equilibrium represents an idiosyncratic outcome or a broader regional pattern with implications for how democratic durability should be measured and forecast. For practitioners in development and civil society sectors, the message is more cautionary: sustainable democratic consolidation in Indonesia and comparable contexts will likely require attention to the redistribution of economic power and the cultivation of autonomous social constituencies—labor, independent business, and civic organizations—capable of counterbalancing entrenched oligarchic interests, rather than relying solely on procedural and institutional reforms. As Indonesia approaches further electoral cycles amid growing concerns over democratic erosion, this Moore-informed structural perspective offers a sobering but analytically rigorous framework for anticipating whether the country's democratic institutions can be deepened or whether they will continue to coexist uneasily with the extractive elite coalitions from which they emerged.