[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-25
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Democratic backsliding across Southeast Asia, coupled with renewed donor interest in "resilient" civil society programming, makes a 2026 Journal of Contemporary Asia article revisiting Barrington Moore's structural theory of political development through the case of Indonesia especially timely. Moore's 1966 study, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, argued that a country's route to modernity — parliamentary democracy, fascism, or communist revolution — was shaped by the historical relationship between landed elites, peasantries, and an emerging commercial bourgeoisie. The new article, titled "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore," applies that sixty-year-old comparative-historical framework to a country that Moore's original three-case typology (built around England, France, the United States, Germany, Japan, China, and Russia) never directly addressed. That the piece appears now, amid debate over Indonesia's post-2024 political direction, signals that scholars are returning to structural, class-based explanations of regime type at a moment when institutionalist and agency-centered "transitology" accounts of democratization have come under strain.
The analytical core of applying Moore's model to Indonesia lies in tracing how the country's agrarian class structure diverged from his three canonical pathways. Moore identified a "bourgeois revolution" route toward democracy where a commercial class allied with peasants against landed aristocracy, a "revolution from above" route toward fascism where landed elites and a weak bourgeoisie preserved agrarian dominance through authoritarian modernization, and a peasant-led revolutionary route toward communism. Indonesia fits none of these cleanly: Dutch colonial rule left a fragmented agrarian elite rather than a unified landed aristocracy, and the country's commercial bourgeoisie developed under conditions of ethnic-Chinese minority status that blocked it from assuming the political leadership role Moore assigned to bourgeois classes in England or France. The article's engagement with Moore therefore has to explain Indonesia's twentieth-century trajectory — Sukarno's Guided Democracy, the mass violence of 1965-66 that destroyed the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and installed Suharto's military-backed New Order, and the authoritarian developmentalism that followed — as a variant pathway rather than a clean fit, using Moore's causal logic (class coalitions, the strength or weakness of a landed upper class, and the peasantry's capacity for independent political action) as an analytical scaffold rather than a predictive template.
This kind of historical-structural revisiting connects to a broader trend in Southeast Asian political economy scholarship, which has increasingly questioned whether procedural, elections-focused models of democratic consolidation can explain outcomes in countries with strong military-business networks and unresolved land questions. Indonesia's post-Suharto Reformasi era, launched after his 1998 resignation, produced formal democratic institutions — direct presidential elections from 2004, a 1999 regional autonomy law that decentralized authority to over 400 districts, and a vibrant NGO and civil society sector supported by donors such as USAID, the Asian Development Bank, and the World Bank. Yet the persistence of oligarchic capital, military business interests, and weak agrarian reform echoes precisely the kind of incomplete bourgeois transformation Moore treated as a warning sign for democratic fragility, rather than its guarantee. Comparable dynamics are visible in the Philippines, where landed political dynasties have similarly constrained agrarian reform since the Marcos era, and in Thailand, where a weak bourgeoisie and recurrent military intervention parallel Moore's "revolution from above" logic more closely than Indonesia's own trajectory does.
For research institutes like IOCSS that track ODA, civil society, and political economy, the policy significance of this line of inquiry is considerable. Donor programming on democracy and governance in Indonesia — decentralization support, anti-corruption initiatives, and civil society capacity-building funded through bilateral and multilateral channels — has generally assumed that strengthening formal institutions and NGO networks produces durable democratic consolidation. A Moore-inflected reading suggests that such interventions may be insufficient, or even superficial, if they do not address the underlying agrarian and oligarchic class structures that a study like this one identifies as the deeper drivers of regime trajectory. This has direct implications for how development agencies design civil society support: programs oriented toward electoral monitoring and legal-institutional reform may need to be paired with attention to land tenure, rural inequality, and the political economy of Indonesia's business-military elite networks if they are to address the structural conditions Moore's framework foregrounds.
Looking forward, the return of Prabowo Subianto — a former Kopassus special forces general and Suharto's one-time son-in-law — to the Indonesian presidency following the February 2024 election gives this historical-structural revisiting immediate contemporary relevance. Prabowo's ascent, achieved in part through an alliance with outgoing president Joko Widodo's family network, has renewed scholarly and civil society concern about the durability of Indonesia's democratic institutions and the weight that New Order-era elite networks still carry within them. Researchers working in the tradition this article represents will likely extend the inquiry by examining whether Indonesia's civil society organizations, agrarian movements, and decentralized local governments can function as the kind of independent political actors Moore considered necessary for democratic consolidation, or whether oligarchic continuity will instead reproduce authoritarian tendencies under democratic forms. For practitioners designing ODA-funded governance and civil society programs, and for scholars in comparative political economy, the article's revival of Moore's framework offers a reminder that formal democratic procedures are not self-sustaining absent the deeper class realignments his 1966 study identified as their historical precondition.