[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-02
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
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The question of why some post-colonial states consolidated durable authoritarian rule while others eventually transitioned to competitive electoral politics remains one of the most consequential puzzles in comparative political economy, and Indonesia offers a particularly instructive case. A newly published article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, titled "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore" (DOI 10.1080/00472336.2026.2697467, 2026), returns to this puzzle by reactivating one of the field's foundational theoretical frameworks. At a moment when democratic backsliding is being tracked across Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Myanmar, and when donor institutions are reassessing how civil society and state capacity interact with regime trajectories, revisiting Indonesia through a structural-historical lens carries clear relevance for both scholars and development practitioners monitoring the region's political economy.
The article's title explicitly signals an engagement with Barrington Moore's classic comparative-historical framework, most famously elaborated in his 1966 study of the social origins of dictatorship and democracy, which argued that the class coalitions formed during the transition from agrarian to industrial economies — particularly the relative strength of a commercially independent bourgeoisie versus a landed aristocracy allied with the state — shaped whether a country moved toward parliamentary democracy, fascism, or communist revolution. By applying this framework to Indonesia, the Journal of Contemporary Asia piece positions the country's political development as a test case for whether Moore's mid-twentieth-century European and Asian comparisons (drawn from England, France, Germany, the United States, China, and Japan) retain explanatory power when extended to a Southeast Asian archipelago with a distinct colonial legacy under Dutch rule, a protracted period of "Guided Democracy" under Sukarno, and more than three decades of military-backed authoritarianism under Suharto's New Order from 1966 to 1998. The categorization of the article under the theme of "regime and electoral change" (정권·선거 변동) underscores that its core contribution is diagnostic: using Indonesia's documented sequence of authoritarian consolidation and subsequent Reformasi-era democratization as empirical material against which Moore's class-coalition logic can be tested, refined, or qualified.
Situating this scholarship within broader regional and global trends in civil society and political economy research is instructive. Indonesia's 1998 transition — triggered by the Asian Financial Crisis and the collapse of the Suharto regime — has long served comparativists as a reference case for theories of democratization that emphasize economic shock, elite fragmentation, and civil society mobilization rather than classical class-based explanations alone. A study that explicitly reintroduces Moore's framework into this literature implicitly engages with decades of scholarship on Indonesia's oligarchic democracy, in which scholars such as those associated with the "political economy of Indonesia" tradition have argued that post-1998 democratic institutions were captured by the same business and bureaucratic elites who thrived under the New Order, producing a hybrid system of competitive elections layered atop entrenched economic power. By foregrounding Moore's comparative method, the Journal of Contemporary Asia article invites a reassessment of whether Indonesia's democratic consolidation since 1998, including the peaceful transitions through the presidencies of Megawati Sukarnoputri, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, and Joko Widodo, reflects a genuine bourgeois-democratic coalition in Moore's sense or a more contingent, elite-pacted outcome that classical class analysis would struggle to predict.
For policy and research communities engaged in ODA, democracy support, and civil society strengthening across Southeast Asia, the significance of reopening the Moore framework lies in its implications for how donor agencies diagnose regime resilience and vulnerability. Programs funded by institutions such as USAID, the Asia Foundation, or bilateral donors including KOICA have historically supported Indonesian civil society organizations, electoral oversight bodies, and anti-corruption agencies such as the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) on the assumption that strengthening non-state actors independently advances democratic consolidation. A structural analysis rooted in Moore's class-coalition logic complicates this assumption by suggesting that the durability of democratic institutions depends less on the vibrancy of civil society per se than on the underlying balance of economic power between commercial, landed, and state-affiliated elites — a balance that civil society support programs rarely target directly. If the article's application of Moore's framework to Indonesia demonstrates that class coalitions, rather than institutional design or civic mobilization, best explain the persistence of oligarchic features within Indonesian democracy, this would carry direct implications for how development institutions calibrate governance and civil-society-strengthening interventions in similarly structured economies across the region, including the Philippines and Thailand.
Looking forward, this reengagement with Barrington Moore's comparative-historical method through the Indonesian case should prompt researchers and practitioners to treat regime trajectories as path-dependent outcomes of long-run class formation rather than as products of recent institutional reform alone. For scholars of Southeast Asian political economy, the article's publication in the Journal of Contemporary Asia in 2026 suggests renewed academic appetite for classical comparative-historical sociology as a corrective to narrower institutionalist and transitions-focused literatures that dominated democratization studies after 1998. For practitioners at institutions such as IOCSS tracking regime and electoral change across the Global South, the Indonesian case serves as a reminder that durable democratic consolidation cannot be assessed through electoral calendars or civil society indicators alone, but requires attention to the deeper economic coalitions — oligarchic, bureaucratic, and commercial — that Moore's framework identifies as the true determinants of whether a pathway leads toward dictatorship, fragile democracy, or genuine pluralism.