[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-17
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Indonesia's democratic trajectory since 1998 has become one of the most closely watched cases in comparative politics, precisely because it defies easy categorization. It is neither a straightforward success story of liberal consolidation nor a clear case of authoritarian relapse, but rather a hybrid order in which formal electoral competition coexists with entrenched oligarchic power, weak rule of law, and periodic democratic backsliding under figures such as Joko Widodo and now Prabowo Subianto. Against this backdrop, revisiting Barrington Moore's classic 1966 thesis on the social origins of dictatorship and democracy offers more than an academic exercise in historical sociology. Moore's argument that the political character of a modernizing state is shaped by the class coalitions forged among landlords, peasants, and the emerging bourgeoisie during the transition out of agrarian society provides a structural lens through which to interpret why some postcolonial states consolidate competitive politics while others fall into bureaucratic authoritarianism or oscillate between the two, as Indonesia arguably has. The article's return to Moore in the context of Indonesia is timely given renewed scholarly interest in "elite settlement" and class-based explanations of democratic durability at a moment when institutionalist and modernization-theory accounts have struggled to explain the global pattern of democratic erosion.
The analytical core of applying Moore's framework to Indonesia lies in tracing how the archipelago's agrarian class structure, and the absence of a genuinely independent bourgeois revolution, shaped its twentieth-century political pathways. Unlike Moore's classic English case, where an ascendant commercial and industrial bourgeoisie allied with segments of the gentry to check royal absolutism and lay the groundwork for parliamentary democracy, Indonesia's path to modern statehood was mediated by Dutch colonial extraction, a weak indigenous capitalist class, and a military that emerged from the anti-colonial struggle as the most cohesive national institution. This produced conditions closer to what Moore identified as the "capitalist reactionary" or fascist route, in which a coalition of landlords, a dependent bourgeoisie, and coercive state apparatuses suppresses peasant mobilization from above rather than incorporating it through reform. Suharto's New Order, consolidated after the mass violence of 1965-66 that destroyed the Indonesian Communist Party and its rural base, fits this pattern closely: it was a labor-repressive, military-backed developmental state that relied on suppressing independent peasant and worker organization while cultivating a politically dependent business class through patronage rather than autonomous capital accumulation. An article grounded in Moore's typology would likely argue that this configuration explains both the New Order's durability and the particular character of the democratization that followed its collapse in 1998 — a transition driven less by a triumphant bourgeoisie demanding political rights than by elite fragmentation, economic crisis, and the loosening of coercive capacity.
This class-analytic reading connects directly to broader debates about civil society and ODA-supported democratization across Southeast Asia and the Global South more broadly. Much of the donor-funded democracy-promotion literature of the 1990s and 2000s treated civil society organizations, election monitoring bodies, and legal reform projects as largely autonomous engines of democratic consolidation, implicitly assuming that institutional engineering could substitute for the underlying social coalitions Moore identified as decisive. Indonesia's post-Suharto experience — where reformasi-era civil society activism coexisted with the persistence of New Order-era oligarchs, military business interests, and predatory local elites who simply migrated into electoral politics — has become a touchstone for scholars skeptical of that assumption. Work by Richard Robison, Vedi Hadiz, and others on "predatory" or "oligarchic" democracy in Indonesia has long argued that formal democratization without a corresponding transformation of underlying class power produces exactly the kind of shallow, elite-captured pluralism Indonesia now exhibits. A Moore-inflected analysis reinforces this by suggesting that without a genuine bourgeois or peasant-based reconfiguration of property relations and coercive capacity, electoral competition can be layered atop essentially unreformed agrarian and patrimonial structures, producing durable but illiberal outcomes rather than the liberal consolidation modernization theorists once predicted.
For policy audiences and civil society funders, the implications are significant and somewhat uncomfortable. If democratic durability is fundamentally a function of class coalitions and property relations rather than institutional design or civil society capacity alone, then donor strategies emphasizing technical assistance, election administration, and NGO capacity-building may be addressing symptoms rather than structural causes of democratic fragility. This has particular relevance for ODA programming in Indonesia and comparable middle-income democracies, where development agencies increasingly grapple with the paradox of supporting "good governance" reforms within political economies still organized around land concentration, extractive rents, and patronage networks inherited from authoritarian eras. It also speaks to a growing body of research on how oligarchic wealth — particularly from palm oil, mining, and other resource sectors — has effectively replaced the landlord class in Moore's original schema as the dominant force shaping Indonesia's political settlement, suggesting that contemporary "neo-Moorean" analysis needs to account for globalized capital flows and resource rents in ways the original mid-century framework did not fully anticipate.
Looking forward, this line of inquiry matters for both researchers and practitioners tracking Indonesia's trajectory under Prabowo, whose consolidation of power through coalition co-optation and military reintegration into civilian governance echoes precisely the elite-accommodation dynamics Moore's framework would predict as corrosive to liberal outcomes. For scholars, the challenge is to extend Moore's agrarian-class framework to account for financialized and resource-extractive economies where the relevant coalitions are no longer simply landlords and peasants but conglomerates, military business networks, and digital-era patronage machines. For practitioners in the ODA and civil society space, the lesson is a call for greater attention to structural political economy — land reform, corporate accountability, and anti-oligarchy regulation — as complements to the procedural democracy support that has dominated the field. Indonesia's case suggests that the durability of democratic institutions ultimately rests less on the sophistication of electoral machinery than on whether the underlying coalitions of economic power have genuine incentives to sustain, rather than merely tolerate, competitive politics.