[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-22
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Indonesia's political trajectory since the fall of Suharto in 1998 has remained a touchstone case for comparative democratization scholars, and a new article appearing in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, titled "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore," returns to this case through the lens of one of the most influential works in twentieth-century comparative politics: Barrington Moore's 1966 study Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. The timing is significant. Indonesia, the world's third-largest democracy by population and the largest Muslim-majority nation, has in recent years drawn renewed scrutiny over democratic backsliding under President Joko Widodo's successors, the consolidation of oligarchic power, and the persistence of military and business elites in shaping political outcomes. By explicitly invoking Moore's framework in its title, the article signals an attempt to test whether a theory built on agrarian class structures in England, France, the United States, China, Japan, and India — cases analyzed more than half a century ago — retains explanatory power for a Southeast Asian nation whose modern political economy diverged sharply from the pathways Moore originally mapped.
Moore's central thesis, as classically formulated, held that the political character of a modernizing state — whether it tends toward liberal democracy, fascism, or communist dictatorship — is shaped by the relative strength of the landed aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the peasantry, and by the particular coalition that emerges among them during the transition from agrarian to industrial society. His famous dictum, "no bourgeoisie, no democracy," placed commercial and urban elites at the center of democratic outcomes. An article that places Indonesia in direct conversation with this framework is implicitly asking whether the country's post-authoritarian trajectory — its transition from Suharto's New Order to a competitive electoral system after 1998, followed by signs of re-concentrated elite power in the 2010s and 2020s — can be read through Moore's categories of class coalition and state formation, or whether Indonesia instead demonstrates the limits of a theory rooted in early European and East Asian industrialization. The Journal of Contemporary Asia, a publication with a long history of publishing structuralist and political-economy analyses of Southeast Asian states, is a fitting venue for this kind of theoretical retrieval, since it has historically hosted debates over oligarchy, patrimonialism, and class formation in the region.
Situating this single-country study within broader trends in ODA, civil society, and political economy research is instructive. Much of the scholarship on Indonesian democratization over the past two decades has emphasized the durability of oligarchic networks — business conglomerates, party patronage machines, and security-sector actors — that survived the transition from authoritarian rule rather than being displaced by it, a pattern that resonates with, yet complicates, Moore's bourgeois-democracy thesis. Where Moore associated an independent commercial class with democratic outcomes in cases like England, Indonesian political economy research has instead often described a bourgeoisie deeply entangled with state power and party financing, raising the question of whether such a class fraction can play the democratizing role Moore assigned to it. This tension is not unique to Indonesia; it echoes debates across Southeast and South Asia — from the Philippines to Thailand — over whether capitalist development generates autonomous democratic pressure or instead reinforces elite capture of the state, a question with direct relevance for donors and civil society organizations designing governance and anti-corruption programming in the region.
For research institutions like IOCSS that track the relationship between political regime type and the space available for civil society, an article revisiting Moore's framework through Indonesia carries clear analytical stakes. Structural theories of democratization such as Moore's tend to treat civil society as a downstream consequence of class configuration rather than an independent causal force, which stands in some tension with the post-1990s literature on Indonesian reformasi that credited student movements, NGOs, and press liberalization with driving the 1998 transition. A study that reintroduces Moore into the Indonesian case therefore invites a comparative reassessment: does agency-centered civil society scholarship need to be reconciled with structural class analysis, or do the two operate at different levels of explanation — one accounting for the timing and trigger of regime change, the other for its durability and character over subsequent decades? This question matters for how development agencies and ODA programs calibrate support for civil society actors, since structural accounts would suggest that funding advocacy organizations alone cannot substitute for shifts in the underlying coalition of landed, commercial, and labor interests that Moore identified as decisive.
For policy audiences and comparative researchers, the practical implication is that assessments of Indonesian democratic health — and by extension, assessments of similar large emerging democracies — should not rest solely on procedural indicators such as election competitiveness or press freedom scores, but should also attend to the class and sectoral coalitions underwriting the ruling order, an emphasis consistent with Moore's original methodology of tracing agrarian and commercial class relations into modern state outcomes. Looking forward, the value of this article for both scholars and practitioners will depend on how rigorously it operationalizes Moore's categories for a twenty-first-century Southeast Asian economy shaped by extractive industries, digital platform capital, and transnational investment flows that did not exist in Moore's original cases. Researchers tracking Indonesia's trajectory under its post-Jokowi leadership, and donors calibrating governance and civil-society support in the region, would benefit from watching whether this Journal of Contemporary Asia contribution generates further comparative work applying Moore's framework to other Southeast Asian states navigating similar tensions between oligarchic capital and democratic institutions.