[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-18
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Global politics is once again confronting the fragility of democratic transitions once thought consolidated, and few countries illustrate this uncertainty more vividly than Indonesia, the world's third-largest democracy by population and long treated as a success story of post-authoritarian reform in Southeast Asia. Against a backdrop of democratic backsliding from Hungary to the Philippines, and amid growing scholarly interest in why some middle-income states sustain pluralist institutions while others revert to strongman rule, a reexamination of Indonesia through the lens of Barrington Moore's classic comparative-historical framework is timely. Moore's landmark 1966 study, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, argued that the character of a country's agrarian class structure and the manner in which landed elites, an emerging bourgeoisie, and the peasantry were incorporated into commercial agriculture and industrial capitalism determined whether a society traveled a bourgeois-democratic path, a reactionary or fascist route, or a peasant-based revolutionary trajectory toward communism. Applying this framework to Indonesia, a case Moore's original comparative universe largely bypassed, offers a valuable corrective and a chance to test the durability of a theory built primarily on English, French, American, German, Japanese, and Chinese material against a postcolonial Southeast Asian trajectory shaped by Dutch colonial extraction, a fragmented plantation economy, and a politically weak indigenous bourgeoisie.
The analytical payoff of this exercise lies in how it illuminates the peculiar sequencing of class formation in Indonesia. Unlike the English gentry or the American planter class that Moore places at the center of his bourgeois-democratic route, Indonesia's landed and commercial elites never achieved political autonomy from the colonial and, later, postcolonial state. Dutch colonial policy fostered an export-oriented plantation economy without cultivating an independent domestic bourgeoisie capable of allying with urban commercial interests to press for representative government, a structural deficit that reverberated through the post-independence period. Where Moore's reactionary route depends on a coalition of labor-repressive landlords and a subordinated bourgeoisie backing authoritarian modernization from above, Indonesia's twentieth-century trajectory substituted the military and a patrimonial state apparatus for the landed aristocracy as the organizing authoritarian coalition. Suharto's New Order, consolidated after 1965, fits this modified reactionary pathway closely: it fused military dominance, bureaucratic capitalism, and selective incorporation of Chinese-Indonesian commercial capital into a state-led development model that delivered growth while foreclosing genuine political pluralism for three decades. This adaptation of Moore's typology, rather than undermining his thesis, demonstrates its continued explanatory power once the specific historical agents are substituted to fit a colonial and postcolonial rather than purely endogenous class formation.
Indonesia's 1998 democratic transition further tests and extends Moore's framework by raising the question of what happens when authoritarian coalitions fracture without a triumphant bourgeois-democratic alliance replacing them. The scholarship on Indonesia's post-Suharto order, notably the work of Richard Robison, Vedi Hadiz, and Jeffrey Winters on oligarchic democracy, has long argued that Indonesia's reformasi produced not a clean bourgeois-democratic settlement but a hybrid arrangement in which predatory elites from the New Order period repositioned themselves within competitive electoral institutions rather than being displaced by them. This pattern resonates strongly with Moore's warning that democratization without a genuine reordering of underlying class power risks producing formally pluralist systems that remain substantively captured by entrenched interests. Comparable dynamics are visible across Southeast Asia and beyond, in Thailand's oscillation between electoral government and military intervention, in the Philippines' persistence of dynastic political families within nominally democratic structures, and more broadly across states where extractive-resource economies and weak land reform left agrarian and commercial elites insufficiently disciplined by either market competition or organized labor to produce a durable democratic settlement. For scholars of civil society and official development assistance, this comparative pattern is significant because it suggests that formal institutional transfers, such as election administration support or legislative capacity building, address only the surface layer of democratic consolidation while leaving the deeper distributional and class questions that Moore identified largely untouched.
The policy implications of this historical-structural reading are considerable for development practitioners and donor institutions engaged in democracy and governance programming in Indonesia and comparable middle-income states. If democratic durability depends less on procedural completeness than on the underlying balance among state, capital, and organized social forces, then civil society support strategies that focus narrowly on NGO capacity or election monitoring may be insufficient without complementary attention to land tenure reform, labor organizing rights, and anti-corruption enforcement capable of constraining oligarchic capture. This has direct relevance for how bilateral and multilateral donors calibrate governance assistance, since programs that strengthen electoral mechanics without addressing asset concentration and elite impunity risk reinforcing the very oligarchic democracy pattern that scholars have identified as Indonesia's post-1998 equilibrium. It also has methodological significance for area-studies scholarship, since the Indonesian case demonstrates that Moore's framework, often criticized as Eurocentric or excessively structuralist, retains substantial analytical utility when adapted to account for colonial legacies, military institutions, and ethnic-commercial minorities that did not feature prominently in his original cases.
Looking ahead, Indonesia's trajectory under President Prabowo Subianto, a figure with direct personal and institutional ties to the New Order military establishment, gives this historical-structural inquiry renewed urgency rather than merely retrospective interest. Researchers tracking civil society space, press freedom, and anti-corruption institutions in Indonesia would do well to situate current developments within this longer class-structural narrative rather than treating them as isolated political events, since Moore's central insight, that democratic durability rests on the historical balance of social power rather than institutional design alone, offers a sobering framework for anticipating where Indonesian democracy remains vulnerable to reactionary consolidation. For IOCSS's ongoing work on ODA effectiveness and civil society resilience, the Indonesian case reaffirms that sustainable democratic support requires engaging the political economy of class formation, not merely the technical architecture of democratic institutions.