[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-29
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
이 작업(학술 논문 기반 영문 분석 기사 작성)에 맞는 스킬이 없어(ODA 제안서/보고서, PPT, 회의록, 통화기록 스킬 모두 해당 없음) 바로 작성으로 진행합니다.
Indonesia's political trajectory has become a central test case for scholars trying to understand why some large, ethnically diverse, resource-rich states consolidate democratic rule while others slide back toward authoritarian coalitions. The article "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore," published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia in 2026 (DOI 10.1080/00472336.2026.2697467), returns to this question at a moment when Indonesia's own trajectory looks less settled than it did a decade ago. The election of Prabowo Subianto, a former army general once implicated in human rights controversies during the New Order period, to the presidency in 2024 has revived debates about whether Indonesia's post-1998 democratic settlement is deepening or eroding under the weight of its own elite coalitions. Placing this contemporary anxiety inside a comparative-historical frame associated with Barrington Moore gives the article a theoretical anchor that goes beyond country-specific commentary, situating Indonesia within a broader lineage of scholarship on the social origins of political regimes.
The article's title signals a direct engagement with Moore's 1966 study Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, whose central claim — often summarized as "no bourgeoisie, no democracy" — traced three historical routes to the modern world: a bourgeois-democratic path exemplified by England, France, and the United States; a reactionary-fascist path exemplified by Germany and Japan; and a communist path exemplified by Russia and China, each shaped by the balance of power among landed elites, a commercializing bourgeoisie, and the peasantry. Moore's original comparative set did not include Southeast Asia, and by applying his framework to Indonesia the article implicitly tests whether a case built on plantation agriculture, colonial extraction under Dutch rule, and a post-independence military-bureaucratic elite fits neatly into any of Moore's three pathways or instead requires a modified or additional category. This kind of retrospective application of a classical thesis to a case outside its original evidentiary base is a recognizable move in comparative political economy, and the choice to categorize the piece under "정권·선거 변동" (regime and electoral change) suggests the analysis is oriented toward explaining shifts in regime type rather than offering a static description of Indonesian institutions.
Read against the broader literature on Indonesian political economy, the article's Moore-inspired framing intersects with an established scholarly debate about the character of Indonesian democracy since the fall of Suharto's New Order in 1998. Jeffrey Winters' work on oligarchy and the studies by Vedi Hadiz and Richard Robison on the "predatory state" have long argued that Indonesia's post-Reformasi democracy preserved rather than dismantled the material power of a politico-business oligarchy that survived the transition from authoritarian rule. A Moore-style analysis, with its emphasis on landed and commercial elites as the pivotal actors shaping regime outcomes, dovetails naturally with this oligarchy literature, and situates Indonesia alongside other Southeast Asian cases — the Philippines under recurring elite-dominated electoralism, or Thailand's cycles of coups and restored civilian rule — where formal democratic institutions coexist with concentrated elite control over land, capital, and coercive power. This regional comparison matters because it suggests that Indonesia's experience is not idiosyncratic but part of a recognizable pattern in which decolonization produced electoral systems without fully displacing the landed and military elites who had accumulated power under colonial or authoritarian administration.
For practitioners working in ODA, governance, and civil society support, an analysis grounded in Moore's framework carries a cautionary implication: technical assistance aimed at strengthening electoral administration or judicial institutions may do little to alter regime trajectories if the underlying coalition of landed, military, and business elites remains intact. Indonesia's own history of decentralization reforms, beginning with the 2001 regional autonomy laws, was intended partly to diffuse central authoritarian power, yet subsequent scholarship has documented how local strongmen and business networks captured many of the decentralized institutions rather than democratizing them. Donor agencies and civil society organizations funding democracy-support programs in Indonesia — whether bilateral agencies or multilateral bodies attentive to Southeast Asian governance trends — would need to weigh this history when designing interventions, since a Moore-informed reading implies that durable democratic consolidation depends on shifts in the underlying social coalition, not merely on the calendar of elections or the drafting of institutional rules.
Looking ahead, the article's attempt to test Moore's mid-twentieth-century typology against a twenty-first-century Southeast Asian case opens a productive line of inquiry for researchers tracking regime dynamics beyond the North Atlantic and East Asian cases that dominated Moore's original comparative universe. If Indonesia's pathway resists clean classification into Moore's bourgeois-democratic, fascist, or communist categories, the article's contribution may lie precisely in specifying what a fourth pathway — one shaped by post-colonial military-bureaucratic elites governing through electoral forms — would need to look like theoretically. For IOCSS and similarly oriented research institutes following ODA, civil society, and political economy trends in Asia, the Prabowo presidency offers an immediate empirical setting in which to observe whether Indonesia's democratic institutions continue to accommodate a re-ascendant military-linked elite or whether civil society and electoral competition retain enough autonomous force to constrain that coalition. Either outcome will offer fresh evidence bearing directly on the comparative-historical questions the article revives.