Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-15
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Indonesia's political trajectory over the past three decades offers one of the most instructive test cases in comparative politics for understanding how nations move between authoritarian rule and democratic governance. As the world's third-largest democracy and its largest Muslim-majority nation, Indonesia occupies a uniquely important position in debates over democratic durability at a moment when democratic backsliding has become a defining feature of global politics, from Hungary to the Philippines to India. The recent article "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore," published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, revisits this case through the lens of Barrington Moore's classic 1966 thesis on the social origins of dictatorship and democracy, asking whether the structural and class-based explanations Moore developed from European and Asian historical cases still hold explanatory power for a Southeast Asian nation that has traversed colonialism, authoritarian developmentalism under Suharto, and a post-1998 democratic transition that has itself shown signs of erosion in recent years.
Moore's foundational argument held that the political outcomes of modernization — whether a society ends up with liberal democracy, fascism, or communism — are shaped decisively by the class coalitions that emerge during the transition from agrarian to industrial economies, particularly the relative strength of a commercially oriented bourgeoisie, the fate of the landed aristocracy, and the way peasant populations are incorporated or excluded from the modernizing state. Applying this framework to Indonesia allows the article to interrogate how the country's particular configuration of oligarchic capital, military-bureaucratic power, and a fragmented peasantry produced neither a clean democratic breakthrough nor a stable authoritarian equilibrium, but rather a hybrid trajectory: a formally democratic system since 1998 that nonetheless retains deep continuities with the predatory, patrimonial structures of the New Order. This matters because it complicates any simple narrative of "transition" as a linear movement toward consolidated liberal democracy, instead suggesting that the underlying social coalitions that Moore identified as decisive — particularly the absence of an autonomous bourgeoisie independent of the state and the persistence of a politically weak rural class — continue to constrain the depth and quality of Indonesian democracy even after formal institutional change.
This analysis resonates strongly with broader trends across the ODA and civil society landscape in Southeast and South Asia, where donor-funded democracy promotion programs of the 1990s and 2000s often assumed that free elections, decentralization, and civil society strengthening would organically deepen liberal norms. Indonesia's experience — alongside comparable trajectories in Thailand, the Philippines, and Bangladesh — suggests instead that formal democratic architecture can coexist indefinitely with oligarchic capture, patronage-based party systems, and periodic reassertions of military or elite prerogative. The Moore-inspired class analysis is a useful corrective to donor-driven institutionalist frameworks that focus heavily on constitutional design, electoral administration, and NGO capacity-building while underweighting the structural political economy of land, capital, and labor that determines whether formal institutions translate into substantive democratic accountability. For civil society organizations and development agencies working in the region, this reframes the persistent "good governance" gap not as a technical deficiency to be solved through training and capacity-building, but as a structural feature rooted in unresolved agrarian and capitalist class relations — a much harder problem to address through conventional ODA instruments.
The policy implications of this line of analysis are significant for both donor governments and multilateral development institutions engaged in democracy and governance programming. If democratic quality in countries like Indonesia is fundamentally conditioned by the class coalitions underpinning the state — rather than simply the presence or absence of competitive elections and independent courts — then governance assistance strategies premised on institution-building alone are likely to have limited traction against entrenched oligarchic interests. This suggests a need for development actors to engage more seriously with political economy analysis that maps who actually controls capital, land, and economic rents in recipient countries, and to calibrate civil society support toward organizations capable of shifting underlying power balances — labor unions, agrarian reform movements, and anti-corruption coalitions — rather than exclusively toward technocratic governance NGOs. It also raises uncomfortable questions for donors about the risk of legitimizing formally democratic but substantively captured states through continued aid flows and diplomatic normalization, a dilemma increasingly visible in Western engagement with Indonesia under successive administrations that have combined democratic legitimacy with growing illiberal practices, including restrictions on civil society space and the prosecution of critics.
Looking forward, this Moore-informed reassessment of Indonesia carries lessons that extend well beyond a single country case and speak directly to the broader research agenda on democratic resilience and backsliding that now dominates comparative politics and development studies. As scholars and practitioners grapple with why so many "third wave" democracies have proven fragile, structural class-based frameworks like Moore's offer an important counterweight to institutionalist and cultural explanations that have tended to dominate policy discourse. For researchers, this points toward a renewed research agenda combining historical political economy with contemporary governance studies, tracing how colonial-era land and capital arrangements continue to shape twenty-first-century political outcomes. For practitioners in the ODA and civil society space, the lesson is one of humility about the limits of externally funded institutional reform in the face of durable domestic class coalitions, and a corresponding need to support long-term, locally rooted movements for structural change rather than short-cycle governance projects. As Indonesia approaches its next electoral cycles amid ongoing debates over military reintegration into civilian affairs and the concentration of economic power among a narrow oligarchic elite, its trajectory will remain a critical bellwether for whether large, diverse, middle-income democracies can deepen rather than merely maintain their democratic institutions.