[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-23
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Indonesia's political trajectory has once again become a focal point for scholars of comparative democratization, and the Journal of Contemporary Asia's 2026 publication of "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*" arrives at a moment when global attention to democratic resilience and backsliding is especially acute. Indonesia, the world's third-largest democracy and its largest Muslim-majority nation, has spent the past quarter-century as a test case for whether post-authoritarian states in Southeast Asia can sustain electoral competition, civilian oversight of the military, and civil society space after decades of centralized rule. Positioned within the journal's "정권·선거 변동" (regime and electoral change) category, the article signals its ambition through its title alone: it places Indonesia's twentieth- and twenty-first-century political development in direct dialogue with Barrington Moore's foundational 1966 study, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, one of the most cited works in comparative historical sociology.
Moore's original thesis argued that the class character of a country's transition to modernity determined its ultimate political destination, tracing three principal routes: a bourgeois-led path culminating in liberal democracy (as in England, France, and the United States), a reactionary coalition of landed elites and industrialists producing fascism (as in Germany and Japan), and a peasant-based revolutionary path toward communism (as in Russia and China). Moore's famous dictum—"no bourgeoisie, no democracy"—placed the commercial and industrial middle class at the center of democratic emergence. Applying this framework to Indonesia is inherently provocative, because Indonesia's modern political history does not map cleanly onto any of Moore's three routes. The country moved from Dutch colonial rule through Sukarno's Guided Democracy, into General Suharto's New Order authoritarian-developmentalist regime from 1966 to 1998, and then into the Reformasi era of electoral democracy after Suharto's fall. A study invoking Moore's framework for this case is positioned to interrogate whether Indonesia's landed and commercial classes, its military, and its peasantry played roles analogous to those Moore identified in early industrializers, or whether Indonesia's path—shaped by colonial extraction, Cold War geopolitics, and state-led industrialization—requires a substantially revised theoretical account of how class coalitions produce, or fail to produce, durable democratic outcomes.
This kind of theoretical revisiting connects to a broader trend in the political economy of development across the Asia-Pacific, where scholars have long debated whether Moore-style class analysis, modernization theory, or state-centered developmental models best explain divergent regime trajectories among Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Myanmar. Indonesia's New Order period is frequently cited alongside South Korea and Taiwan as an example of authoritarian developmentalism that nonetheless generated the socioeconomic preconditions—urbanization, an expanding middle class, and organized labor and student movements—that later supported a transition to competitive elections after 1998. Within IOCSS's ongoing interest in civil society and ODA-related political economy, this matters directly: donor-funded civil society organizations, labor unions, and student networks played visible roles in the Reformasi movement that ended Suharto's 32-year rule, illustrating how class formation processes that Moore treated as primarily domestic can also be shaped by transnational development assistance, foreign investment, and international financial institutions engaging with Jakarta from the 1970s onward.
The policy and research significance of reopening the Moore framework for a case like Indonesia extends well beyond historical debate. For researchers, the exercise tests the portability of a theory built on European and East Asian cases to a Southeast Asian, formerly colonized, resource-exporting economy with a large agrarian sector and a historically fragmented bourgeoisie—raising questions about whether class-coalition models need modification to account for ethnic and religious cleavages, military autonomy, and archipelagic geography that shaped Indonesian state formation differently from Moore's original comparators. For practitioners in the ODA and civil society space, the implications are equally concrete: if middle-class formation and civil society autonomy were decisive variables in Indonesia's democratic transition, then donor strategies aimed at supporting independent business associations, labor organizations, and civic groups in other transitional or hybrid regimes gain theoretical grounding from a canonical text in comparative politics rather than from development-sector conventional wisdom alone.
Indonesia's relevance to this debate is not merely historical. Since President Prabowo Subianto assumed office in October 2024, observers of Indonesian politics have raised concerns about the durability of post-Reformasi checks on executive and military power, making a historically grounded reassessment of the class and institutional foundations of Indonesian democracy timely rather than academic in the narrow sense. A Moore-inflected analysis invites researchers to ask whether the socioeconomic coalitions that enabled Indonesia's 1998 transition remain intact, weakening, or reconfigured under current conditions, and whether civil society organizations that trace their institutional lineage to the Reformasi era retain the autonomy Moore's framework would identify as necessary for democratic durability.
Looking forward, this article's contribution should be read as part of a wider revival of interest in structural and historical-comparative approaches to regime change, at a moment when many analysts have turned toward more proximate explanatory variables such as populism, social media, and elite polarization. By returning to Barrington Moore and testing his framework against Indonesia's specific trajectory—from colonial-era agrarian structures through Suharto-era developmentalism to contemporary electoral politics—the study offers both a theoretical corrective and a case study of continuing relevance to scholars and development practitioners tracking whether Southeast Asia's largest democracy can sustain the institutional gains of the past quarter-century. For IOCSS's own research agenda on ODA, civil society, and political economy, the piece is a reminder that donor engagement with civil society actors is inseparable from the deeper class and institutional dynamics that classical comparative political sociology first identified nearly sixty years ago.