[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-21
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Democracy's fragility in Southeast Asia has become one of the defining preoccupations of comparative political economy over the past decade, as Indonesia—long celebrated as the world's largest Muslim-majority democracy and a post-Suharto success story—has exhibited troubling signs of illiberal drift, elite cartelization, and the erosion of checks on executive power. Against this backdrop, the article "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore," published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, revisits one of the most influential frameworks in comparative historical sociology to make sense of Indonesia's trajectory. Moore's 1966 classic, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, argued that the class coalitions forged during the transition from agrarian to industrial society—particularly the relative strength of a commercially oriented bourgeoisie, the fate of the landed aristocracy, and the political weight of the peasantry—determined whether a nation would follow a path toward liberal democracy, fascism, or communist revolution. Applying this lens to Indonesia is both a natural and a demanding exercise, given the country's colonial legacy, its distinctive experience of agrarian transformation under Dutch extraction, and the peculiar role of the military and bureaucratic elite in shaping its twentieth-century political economy.
The article's core contribution lies in testing whether Moore's class-coalition model, developed primarily from European and East Asian cases, can illuminate Indonesia's oscillation between authoritarianism and democratization. Indonesia never produced a landed aristocracy in the classical Moore sense; instead, Dutch colonial rule created a hybrid agrarian structure in which indigenous smallholders coexisted with plantation capital and a weak, dependent domestic bourgeoisie that lacked the political autonomy Moore identified as crucial to the "bourgeois" route to democracy in England, France, and the United States. This absence, the article suggests, helps explain why Indonesia's postcolonial political development diverged so sharply from the liberal-democratic path: without an assertive commercial class capable of asserting itself against both the state and the peasantry, power gravitated instead toward a military-bureaucratic elite that could mediate between foreign capital, patronage networks, and a fragmented peasant base. Suharto's New Order regime, in this reading, represents not an aberration but a structurally predictable outcome of Indonesia's agrarian class configuration—a conservative modernization from above analogous in spirit, though not in mechanism, to Moore's "reactionary" pathway typified by Prussia and Japan. The article's treatment of the 1965-66 mass violence and the destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) as a case of preemptive elite counter-revolution against an incipient peasant-based mobilization further extends Moore's framework, positioning Indonesia's anti-communist purge alongside the landlord-led repressions Moore analyzed in his discussion of aborted peasant revolutions.
Where the article moves beyond a straightforward application of Moore is in grappling with Indonesia's post-1998 democratization, a case Moore's original framework was never designed to explain, since it long predates the "third wave" and the phenomenon of democratic transition without a prior bourgeois or peasant revolutionary rupture. Here the analysis engages the substantial literature on how oligarchic reconfiguration—rather than class transformation—drove Indonesia's Reformasi. Scholars such as Jeffrey Winters and Vedi Hadiz have argued that Indonesian democratization preserved rather than dismantled the predatory politico-business networks cultivated under Suharto, producing what is often termed "oligarchic democracy": competitive elections and formal pluralism coexisting with entrenched rent-seeking and elite capture of the state. The article's engagement with Moore thus becomes an opportunity to interrogate the limits of a class-based framework in an era where finance capital, decentralized patronage, and transnational economic integration complicate the neat categories of bourgeoisie, landlord, and peasant that anchored Moore's mid-century analysis. This tension—between a structuralist theory built for the agrarian-industrial transition and a contemporary Indonesia shaped by resource extraction, digital-era populism, and dynastic political families—gives the article its analytical edge and its relevance to current debates about democratic backsliding.
These findings resonate well beyond Indonesia, speaking to broader patterns across the Global South where ODA-recipient and middle-income democracies increasingly display what scholars call "competitive authoritarianism" or "illiberal democracy" hybrids. Indonesia's recent trajectory—marked by weakening anti-corruption institutions, the entrenchment of political dynasties exemplified by the Widodo-Prabowo transition, and the securitization of civil society space—mirrors developments in the Philippines, Thailand, and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where formal democratic architecture persists alongside deepening oligarchic control. For institutions like IOCSS that track civil society space and democratic governance as preconditions for effective development cooperation, the article's Moore-inflected analysis offers a useful corrective to overly voluntarist or institutionalist accounts of democratic backsliding: it insists that durable political outcomes are rooted in the structural balance of class and economic power, not merely in constitutional design or donor-supported governance reforms. This has direct implications for how development agencies calibrate democracy-support programming, since technical assistance aimed at strengthening electoral commissions or judicial independence may have limited traction if it does not address the underlying concentration of economic power in oligarchic networks that Moore's framework foregrounds.
For researchers and practitioners engaged with Indonesia and comparable middle-income democracies, the article's forward-looking significance lies in its implicit call to update rather than discard structuralist theory. Future research would benefit from integrating Moore's class-coalition logic with contemporary political economy tools—analyses of rentier extraction, transnational capital flows, and digital platform politics—to build a more complete account of why some post-colonial democracies consolidate while others regress toward hybrid or authoritarian equilibria. Practitioners in the ODA and civil society space should take from this analysis a sobering lesson: sustaining Indonesia's democratic institutions, and those of similarly positioned states, requires attention not only to procedural safeguards but to the deeper distribution of economic power among business elites, security establishments, and rural constituencies. As Indonesia approaches its next electoral cycles under continued dynastic and military-adjacent influence, this Moore-inspired framework offers both a warning and a research agenda—reminding scholars that the "pathways" of democratization and dictatorship remain contingent on class coalitions whose contemporary Indonesian form is oligarchic, extractive, and still very much in formation.