[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-24
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Recent scholarship on Southeast Asian political trajectories has renewed interest in classical comparative-historical sociology to explain why some societies consolidate democratic institutions while others slide toward authoritarian rule. A 2026 article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, titled "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore," revisits this question by applying the analytical framework of Barrington Moore Jr., whose 1966 study Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy examined how the relative power of landed elites, peasantries, and commercial classes shaped divergent national paths toward liberal democracy, fascism, or communist revolution. The choice of Indonesia as a case study is significant: the country has moved from Sukarno's Guided Democracy, through more than three decades of Suharto's authoritarian New Order, to the post-1998 Reformasi period, and now to a political landscape shaped by the 2024 election of Prabowo Subianto, a former general with ties to the Suharto era. This trajectory makes Indonesia an unusually rich test case for Moore's thesis that class coalitions, not simply institutional design or elite intentions, determine whether a state moves toward dictatorship or democracy.
The article's core contribution appears to lie in reassessing Moore's class-coalition model against Indonesia's specific historical sequence, particularly the destruction of the Indonesian left after 1965-66, the subsequent alliance between military elites, technocrats, and segments of the bureaucratic and commercial bourgeoisie under Suharto, and the eventual, negotiated transition to electoral democracy after 1998. Where Moore's original framework was built primarily on cases such as England, France, the United States, China, and Japan, extending it to Indonesia requires grappling with a postcolonial state in which the "landed upper class" of Moore's typology was less dominant than a militarized bureaucratic elite that fused political and economic power directly. By foregrounding this divergence, the article situates Indonesia within a broader conversation in comparative politics about whether Moore's mid-twentieth-century categories can travel to late-developing, postcolonial states whose class structures were shaped as much by colonial extraction and Cold War intervention as by agrarian property relations.
This theoretical exercise connects directly to broader debates in Journal of Contemporary Asia and cognate literatures on democratic backsliding across the region. Indonesia has often been cited, alongside the Philippines and Thailand, as a case of "democratic regression" or "illiberal consolidation," in which formally competitive elections coexist with entrenched oligarchic networks, weakened civil society oversight, and periodic re-militarization of politics. The election of Prabowo Subianto, who as a New Order-era general faced allegations tied to human rights abuses in 1998, and his subsequent alliance with outgoing president Joko Widodo's political network, is frequently read by analysts as evidence that Indonesia's democratic transition, while procedurally durable since 1999, has not fully dislodged the political and economic elites who thrived under authoritarian rule. Framing this through Moore's lens implicitly argues that today's political outcomes cannot be understood merely as institutional legacies of Reformasi-era reforms, such as direct presidential elections or decentralization, but must be traced to the deeper class settlement that emerged from the anti-communist violence of the mid-1960s and the subsequent New Order political economy.
For research on official development assistance and civil society, this kind of historical-structural analysis carries direct implications. Donor agencies and multilateral institutions have long approached Indonesian governance reform, anti-corruption programming, and civil society support as matters of institutional capacity-building — funding electoral commissions, judicial reform, or NGO coalitions on the assumption that stronger institutions incrementally produce stronger democracy. A Moore-inspired reading suggests instead that the durability of democratic norms depends on the underlying balance among the military, bureaucratic elites, an emergent business class, and organized labor or agrarian interests — a balance that technical assistance programs rarely address directly. This has implications for how institutions such as the International Observatory of Civil Society Studies might assess ODA effectiveness in Indonesia and comparable states: capacity-building metrics may capture procedural improvements while missing the deeper class realignments that determine whether such gains are reversible, as arguably occurred with the erosion of anti-corruption enforcement under the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) following controversial 2019 legal revisions widely criticized by Indonesian civil society groups.
Looking forward, the article's engagement with Barrington Moore offers both an invitation and a caution to researchers and practitioners working on Indonesia and comparable transitional states. The invitation is to take seriously long-run class formation, including the role of military-business networks, plantation and resource-extraction elites, and urban middle classes, as variables shaping regime trajectories rather than treating democratic or authoritarian outcomes as products of leadership choices or constitutional design alone. The caution is methodological: applying a framework built on early-industrializing agrarian societies to a twenty-first-century postcolonial state requires careful adaptation rather than mechanical transposition. As Indonesia navigates the Prabowo presidency amid ongoing debates over civil-military relations, press freedom, and the space available to civil society organizations, scholars publishing in outlets such as the Journal of Contemporary Asia will likely continue testing whether classical comparative-historical models retain explanatory power for contemporary Southeast Asian political economy, or whether new frameworks are needed to capture the region's distinctive pathways between dictatorship and democracy.