[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-27
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Indonesia's trajectory from the authoritarian New Order to a competitive, if increasingly contested, democracy remains one of the most closely watched cases in comparative politics, and a forthcoming article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore" (published online in 2026, DOI 10.1080/00472336.2026.2697467), returns to this case through the lens of Barrington Moore's classic comparative-historical sociology. The timing is significant: with Indonesia now the world's third-largest democracy by population and a bellwether for whether large, religiously plural, resource-dependent states can sustain electoral government, revisiting the structural preconditions of democratization is more than an academic exercise. As democratic backsliding has become a recurring theme across Southeast Asia and beyond, testing an established framework like Moore's against a case as complex as Indonesia offers a disciplined way to ask whether older theories of regime change still travel to twenty-first-century Asia.
The article's explicit engagement with Moore situates it within a specific intellectual lineage. Moore's landmark study argued that the class coalitions formed during the commercialization of agriculture—whether landed elites allied with the state to suppress peasants and labor, or a strong bourgeoisie broke from agrarian elites to push political liberalization—determined whether societies followed the route to democracy, fascism, or communist revolution. By titling the piece "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy," the authors signal an intent to test whether Indonesia's own bifurcated history—over three decades of Suharto's authoritarian New Order followed by the post-1998 Reformasi transition to multiparty democracy—can be explained by the same class-coalition logic Moore developed from cases such as England, France, the United States, China, and Japan. Applying this framework to Indonesia is a demanding exercise precisely because the country does not fit neatly into Moore's original categories: its economy was never organized around the kind of commercialized landed agriculture central to Moore's European cases, and its transition to democracy came not through bourgeois revolution but through a financial crisis, student mobilization, and elite defection in 1997–1998.
This kind of theory-testing matters for how researchers understand civil society and political economy across the wider region, a core concern for institutions like IOCSS. Indonesia is frequently cited alongside the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan as part of Asia's "third wave" democratization cohort, yet each of these cases diverged from Moore's European and East Asian templates in different ways—oligarchic capture in the Philippines, labor-led mobilization in South Korea, and a hybrid of authoritarian-legacy elites and civil society mobilization in Indonesia. Publishing this reassessment in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, a journal with a long track record of political-economy scholarship on the region, situates the Indonesia case within debates over whether class-based structural theories or contingency-driven, actor-centered accounts better explain why some Southeast Asian states democratized while neighboring states, such as Cambodia or Vietnam, did not. The article's framing invites comparison with Indonesia's own subnational and sectoral variation—plantation economies in Sumatra and Kalimantan, urban middle-class formation in Java—as a way of asking whether a single national "pathway" can capture a country as internally heterogeneous as Indonesia.
For policy audiences and donors engaged in democracy-support and governance programming, revisiting Moore's structural theory through Indonesia carries direct implications. If Indonesia's democratic consolidation is better explained by durable class coalitions—landed and business elites who accommodated rather than opposed democratic institutions after 1998—rather than by the civic-education or institution-building programs often prioritized in ODA-funded governance projects, this would suggest that international support aimed narrowly at electoral administration or civil society capacity-building addresses only part of the picture. Conversely, if the article finds that Moore's framework fails to capture Indonesia's trajectory, this would reinforce arguments already circulating in Southeast Asian studies that donor-funded democracy programming needs Indonesia-specific theories of change rather than imported templates developed from European agrarian histories. Either conclusion matters for how organizations such as USAID, the Asia Foundation, or European development agencies calibrate governance and rule-of-law programming in Indonesia, where recent controversies—including revisions to the KPK anti-corruption law and debates over military reinsertion into civilian administration—have already raised questions about the durability of post-Suharto reforms.
The Indonesia case also speaks to broader debates in the political economy of development about the relationship between economic structure and regime type, a theme central to IOCSS's mandate. Indonesia's economy, still heavily dependent on commodity exports such as palm oil, coal, and nickel, complicates any straightforward application of Moore's bourgeoisie-versus-landed-elite dichotomy, since resource-extraction elites in Indonesia often straddle both state and private capital in ways that classical agrarian capitalism did not anticipate. This matters for scholars tracking "resource curse" literatures and their intersection with democratization theory, since Indonesia is frequently held up as a partial counterexample to resource-curse pessimism—a resource-dependent state that nonetheless democratized and has sustained competitive elections since 1999. An article that puts Moore's class-coalition model in direct dialogue with Indonesia's post-Suharto political economy offers a test case for whether structural theories of democratization need updating to account for extractive-sector elites who do not map cleanly onto Moore's landed-versus-bourgeois categories.
Looking ahead, this reassessment of Indonesia through Barrington Moore's framework arrives at a moment when researchers and practitioners alike are searching for more robust explanations of democratic durability and reversal across Asia. For comparative political economists, the value of the exercise lies less in confirming or rejecting Moore wholesale than in clarifying which elements of his class-coalition logic remain portable to a non-European, resource-dependent, religiously plural democracy, and which require substantial revision. For practitioners designing governance and civil-society programming in Indonesia and comparable Southeast Asian states, the lesson is a call for humility about theoretical portability: frameworks built on nineteenth-century European agrarian transformations demand careful adaptation before they can guide diagnosis of contemporary risks to Indonesian democracy, from oligarchic consolidation to the political rehabilitation of New Order-era networks. As Indonesia heads toward its next electoral cycles under continued scrutiny of its democratic institutions, scholarship that rigorously tests inherited theory against the country's specific historical pathway—rather than assuming its applicability—will remain essential reading for both the academic and donor communities tracking the country's trajectory.