[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-20
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Indonesia's political trajectory over the past six decades offers one of the more intellectually generative cases for testing grand theories of regime formation, and the appearance of a study explicitly engaging Barrington Moore's classic framework in the Journal of Contemporary Asia arrives at an apt moment. Moore's 1966 Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy argued that the class coalitions forged during the commercialization of agriculture — whether landed elites allied with the state to repress peasant demands, or a rising bourgeoisie able to break the power of the countryside — determined whether a nation moved toward parliamentary democracy, fascism, or communist revolution. Applying that lens to Indonesia is a natural and overdue extension of comparative historical sociology, since Indonesia has cycled through nearly every regime type Moore's typology anticipates: a fragile parliamentary democracy in the 1950s, Sukarno's Guided Democracy, Suharto's military-backed authoritarian developmentalism, and a post-1998 democratic transition that has since shown signs of oligarchic entrenchment and illiberal drift. A country that has traversed this much regime variation within a single lifetime is precisely the kind of "hard case" that can either validate or seriously complicate a theory built primarily on English, French, American, German, Japanese, Chinese, and Indian trajectories.
The analytical value of revisiting Moore through Indonesia lies in how imperfectly the archipelago's social structure maps onto his original categories. Moore's framework presumes a relatively legible landed class whose relationship to commercial agriculture and labor repression shapes national political outcomes; Indonesia's agrarian history, by contrast, is marked by colonial-era plantation capitalism superimposed on smallholder and communal tenure systems, a weak indigenous landlord class, and a state that after independence — and especially under Suharto's New Order — took on much of the coercive and extractive role that Moore assigns to landed elites in his "reactionary" pathway. Rather than a bourgeoisie displacing an agrarian aristocracy, Indonesia's twentieth century features a military-bureaucratic apparatus that fused with crony capitalists and resource-extraction interests to construct authoritarian stability without ever fully proletarianizing or commercializing the countryside in the manner Moore's European cases assume. A study working through this material would likely argue that Indonesia demands either a substantial modification of Moore's class-coalition logic or an alternative reading in which the state itself, rather than an agrarian bourgeoisie or gentry, becomes the decisive actor commercializing land, repressing labor, and forging the coalition that sustains authoritarian rule — a variant closer to what later scholars in the Moore tradition, such as Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John Stephens, tried to capture by foregrounding the working class and civil society organizations as independent democratizing forces rather than mere byproducts of bourgeois ascendance.
This theoretical exercise resonates well beyond area studies debates about Indonesia specifically. Across Southeast and South Asia, the classic Moore pathways have needed substantial retrofitting to account for postcolonial states where industrialization was compressed, state-led, and often militarized rather than emerging organically from agrarian class conflict. The Philippines under Marcos, Thailand's recurring cycle of coups and elections, and even South Korea's authoritarian developmental state all pose similar puzzles: strong states and weak or state-dependent bourgeoisies complicate any theory that treats capitalist class formation as prior to and determinative of regime outcomes. Indonesia's post-1998 Reformasi period adds a further wrinkle, since democratization there was driven less by a triumphant bourgeoisie demanding political rights than by a convergence of economic crisis, student mobilization, elite defection, and decentralization pressures — a pattern that fits more comfortably within contentious-politics and elite-settlement literatures than within Moore's structural determinism. For scholars of civil society and ODA-recipient political economies, this matters because donor-funded democracy-promotion programming has often implicitly assumed a Moore-like or modernization-theory logic in which a growing middle class and market economy will naturally generate demand for accountable government — an assumption Indonesia's oligarchic democracy, sustained by patronage networks straddling state and private capital, calls seriously into question.
The policy implications of this reassessment are considerable for institutions engaged in governance and civil-society-strengthening programs in Indonesia and comparable middle-income democracies. If durable authoritarian or hybrid outcomes are rooted not in the absence of a bourgeoisie but in the fusion of bureaucratic, military, and business elites into a self-reinforcing coalition — as much of the "oligarchy" literature on Indonesia associated with scholars like Jeffrey Winters and Richard Robison has argued — then civil society support strategies premised on strengthening middle-class associational life or electoral competition alone are likely to under-deliver. Genuine democratic consolidation may instead require interventions that target the specific mechanisms of elite capture: campaign finance opacity, land and resource concessions, judicial independence, and the informal patronage channels linking local strongmen to national party structures. This reframing also has implications for how development agencies assess "democratic backsliding" in Indonesia and similar contexts; rather than reading recent illiberal measures — restrictions on civil society organizations, weakening of the anti-corruption commission, or executive encroachment on judicial appointments — as aberrations from a linear democratic trajectory, a Moore-informed structural analysis suggests these are consistent with the underlying class coalition that has governed Indonesia continuously since the New Order, merely operating through electoral rather than martial-law institutions.
Looking ahead, the enduring value of returning to Moore's framework is not that it provides ready-made answers for Indonesia but that it forces researchers and practitioners to specify precisely which actors and coalitions are driving regime trajectories, rather than relying on thinner narratives of institutional design or leadership personality. For researchers, this points toward further comparative work that pairs Indonesia with other post-authoritarian developmental states to refine a genuinely Southeast Asian variant of the class-coalition thesis, one that takes seriously the state's autonomous coercive and economic role. For practitioners in the ODA and civil-society-support space, the lesson is a call for humility about the pace and mechanisms of democratization: elections and market growth alone will not dissolve oligarchic coalitions built over decades, and durable civic space will likely depend on sustained, structurally targeted engagement with the political economy of land, resources, and capital that Moore identified as decisive nearly sixty years ago, even if the specific actors wearing those historical roles look markedly different in twenty-first-century Jakarta than they did in nineteenth-century Prussia or Meiji Japan.