[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-16
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Indonesia occupies a peculiar place in the comparative politics of regime change: a country that moved from a fragile parliamentary experiment through three decades of military-backed authoritarianism under Suharto's New Order, into one of the most consequential democratic transitions of the post-Cold War era, and now shows unmistakable signs of democratic erosion under an increasingly consolidated oligarchic-military elite. This trajectory makes it an unusually rich test case for revisiting Barrington Moore's classic thesis in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, which argued that the political fate of modernizing societies is determined less by ideology or leadership than by the class coalitions forged between landed elites, an emerging bourgeoisie, and the peasantry as agrarian economies commercialize. At a moment when scholars and policymakers are grappling with a global "democratic recession" that has hit middle-income Asian states particularly hard, revisiting Moore's structural framework through the Indonesian case offers a timely corrective to accounts that reduce democratic backsliding to individual leaders, institutional design flaws, or external shocks.
The article's central contribution, as suggested by its title and framing, is to test whether Moore's three canonical pathways—bourgeois-democratic revolution, conservative or fascist modernization from above, and peasant-based revolutionary communism—can accommodate a case that does not map cleanly onto any of them. Indonesia's landed aristocracy was comparatively weak and regionally fragmented, shaped by Dutch colonial extraction rather than an indigenous agrarian capitalist class; its bourgeoisie developed under, and remained dependent on, state patronage rather than as an autonomous force pressing for representative government; and its peasantry, despite the trauma of the 1965-66 anti-communist violence that annihilated the Indonesian Communist Party and its rural base, never generated a sustained revolutionary coalition of the kind Moore associated with agrarian bureaucratic states like China. The likely argument is that Indonesia's authoritarian consolidation under Suharto represented a hybrid path: a military-bureaucratic elite substituting for the "reactionary coalition" of Moore's fascist route, allied not with an independent landed class but with a state-cultivated Sino-Indonesian commercial bourgeoisie and international capital, in a configuration Moore's mid-century categories did not anticipate. This is analytically significant because it suggests the missing ingredient in classical modernization theory is not simply "which class allies with whom" but how postcolonial states themselves acquire an autonomous coercive and economic capacity that lets ruling elites bypass the need for either bourgeois or peasant coalition partners altogether.
Read alongside Indonesia's post-1998 Reformasi, the argument gains further texture. Democratization there was driven less by a triumphant bourgeoisie demanding political rights than by a convergence of student movements, Islamic civil society organizations such as Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, and elite fragmentation following the Asian Financial Crisis's collapse of the New Order's patronage economy. This complicates any straightforward Moore-style reading in which democratization is the achievement of a rising commercial class; in Indonesia, civil society and religious mass organizations performed functions that Moore's framework reserves for an urban bourgeoisie, while much of the actual economic elite that had thrived under Suharto simply migrated into the decentralized, multiparty system as oligarchic power brokers. This pattern—elite continuity dressed in democratic institutional clothing—has become a defining feature of Southeast Asian democratization more broadly, visible in comparable form in the Philippines and Thailand, and it helps explain why formally democratic Indonesia has nonetheless seen a steady erosion of anti-corruption institutions, shrinking space for civil society and press freedom, and the re-militarization of civilian politics, culminating in a political landscape where former New Order-linked figures and family dynasties dominate electoral competition.
These dynamics carry direct implications for how the international donor and development community approaches democracy and governance assistance in Indonesia and comparable middle-income democracies. Decades of ODA-funded programming premised on the assumption that supporting an emergent middle class, strengthening civil society organizations, and building formal democratic institutions would produce durable liberal consolidation now confront the uncomfortable reality that the underlying elite coalition structures Moore identified as decisive have proven remarkably resilient to institutional reform. Oligarchic capture of nominally democratic institutions, rather than their absence, is the more pressing governance challenge, which suggests that donor strategies emphasizing procedural benchmarks—election administration, parliamentary capacity, judicial technical assistance—may be addressing symptoms rather than the underlying political economy of elite bargains over land, resource rents, and state-business patronage networks that Moore's framework foregrounds. Civil society support strategies calibrated to a bourgeois-democratic model of change may also be poorly suited to a context where religious mass organizations, rather than commercial or professional associations, remain the most consequential non-state political actors.
More broadly, this line of inquiry reinforces a wider reassessment underway in comparative political economy: that late-developing and postcolonial states require frameworks attentive to the autonomous role of the developmental or predatory state itself, rather than treating state power as merely an expression of underlying class forces. Indonesia's experience—where authoritarian modernization, democratic transition, and subsequent backsliding have all occurred without the emergence of either a fully autonomous bourgeoisie or a mobilized peasant revolutionary bloc—suggests that Moore's typology, while still analytically generative, needs supplementation with theories of state formation, military political economy, and the resource-driven rent structures that sustain Southeast Asian oligarchies. For researchers, this points toward continued value in structural-historical comparison across the region's diverse trajectories—Philippine elite democracy, Thai military tutelage, Vietnamese one-party market socialism—as a way of refining rather than discarding class-coalition analysis. For practitioners in the ODA and civil society support communities, the lesson is more cautionary: democratic institutions can persist in form while the substantive class bargains underwriting political power remain fundamentally unreformed, meaning that genuine democratic resilience will likely depend on interventions that engage directly with land, resource, and patronage structures rather than institutional design alone.