[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-26
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Modern debates over democratic backsliding, oligarchic capture and the durability of authoritarian-origin regimes have renewed scholarly interest in classical theories of political development, and few works remain as influential in this regard as Barrington Moore's 1966 study, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia on 17 July 2026 as part of the journal's "Looking Back, Going Forward" series, Richard Robison's article "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore" revisits this legacy through the lens of Indonesia, a country whose post-1998 transition from Soeharto's authoritarian New Order to formal electoral democracy has long been cited as a test case for theories of regime change in the Global South. Robison, of the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne, situates his analysis at a moment when many observers of Southeast Asian and broader developing-world politics are asking why democratization so often fails to dislodge entrenched economic power, making the reissue of a Moore-inspired framework more than an academic exercise in intellectual history.
At the core of Robison's argument is the claim that modern Indonesian capitalism did not emerge through the pathways Moore identified in his classic cross-national comparisons — neither a bourgeois revolution from below, nor a state-led "revolution from above," nor an untrammeled expansion of market forces — but rather through the consolidation of an oligarchic order operating within a rentier state. Robison traces this argument back to his own earlier scholarship on the rise of Soeharto's New Order regime in the early 1970s, describing how his encounter with Moore's proposition that pathways to the modern world are forged "in conflicts over power and wealth among forces engendered within the evolution of capitalist society" reoriented his account away from the Cold War-era modernization theory that dominated Indonesian studies at the time. The article's second central claim follows from the first: the oligarchic order that took shape under the New Order proved durable precisely because it constituted, in Robison's words, "a social order with its own powerful vested interests able to colonise and harness democratic and market institutions" — meaning that formal political liberalization after 1998 did not dismantle the underlying structure of power but was instead absorbed and repurposed by it.
This argument resonates with a broader pattern observed across post-authoritarian political economies in Asia and beyond, where democratization scholars have repeatedly found that the removal of a dictator or the introduction of competitive elections does not automatically dissolve the coalitions of economic interest that authoritarian rule helped consolidate. Indonesia's experience since the fall of Soeharto in 1998 — encompassing decentralization, party-list elections and a vibrant civil society sector — has frequently been held up internationally, including by donor and development institutions engaged in Indonesia's governance and anti-corruption programming, as a relative success story of democratic transition in a large, diverse, Muslim-majority nation. Robison's Moore-inflected account complicates that narrative by insisting that the relevant unit of analysis is not the formal institutional shift from authoritarian to electoral rule, but the underlying distribution of power and wealth among competing social forces, a distinction with direct relevance for how researchers and civil society organizations assess whether institutional reforms — anti-corruption commissions, decentralization laws, electoral system redesigns — actually alter the structural balance of power or merely provide new channels through which entrenched interests operate.
For researchers and practitioners working on official development assistance, governance reform and civil society strengthening, the significance of Robison's contribution to the Journal of Contemporary Asia lies in its methodological challenge to reform programming premised on institutional or technocratic fixes. If, as Robison argues, oligarchic interests are able to "colonise and harness" the very democratic and market institutions that reformers rely upon, then donor-supported interventions targeting transparency, rule of law or market liberalization risk being absorbed into the existing order rather than transforming it — a caution consistent with decades of critical political economy scholarship on Southeast Asia but rearticulated here through Moore's comparative-historical framework rather than through dependency theory or more contemporary governance indicators. This has direct implications for how institutions engaged in civil society and political economy research, including those focused on ODA effectiveness, evaluate program design in rentier and resource-dependent states, where the presumption that formal democratic architecture will, over time, erode concentrated economic power may need to be tested empirically rather than assumed.
Looking forward, Robison's revisiting of Moore's framework in the specific context of Indonesia's New Order and its aftermath offers a template that researchers could extend comparatively to other Southeast Asian and post-authoritarian political economies where similar questions about the fate of oligarchic power under democratization remain open. For practitioners designing governance and civil society support programs, the article's central warning — that democratic and market institutions can be captured rather than merely weakened by entrenched interests — suggests that monitoring and evaluation frameworks should look beyond institutional adoption metrics toward the actual redistribution of power and wealth among social forces. As the Journal of Contemporary Asia's "Looking Back, Going Forward" series indicates by design, the value of returning to foundational texts like Moore's 1966 study is not nostalgic but diagnostic: it invites scholars of Indonesia and of comparative political economy more broadly to ask whether the analytical categories developed six decades ago for explaining pathways to dictatorship and democracy still capture the dynamics of oligarchic resilience in twenty-first-century rentier states, and what that implies for the next generation of reform efforts.