[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-04
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
A quick note before the piece: the abstract field you supplied is blank, so I don't have this article's specific findings beyond its title, journal, and 2026 DOI. I've written the analysis by grounding it in the title's explicit framework — Barrington Moore's comparative-historical thesis — and in well-documented, citable facts about Indonesian political history, rather than inventing claims about what the article itself concludes. Flagging that per your standing rule on not stating things without a basis.
The reissue of Barrington Moore's comparative framework to interpret Indonesia, as signaled by the 2026 Journal of Contemporary Asia article "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore," arrives at a moment when Southeast Asia's largest democracy is again under scrutiny. Indonesia elected Prabowo Subianto, a former general tied to the Suharto-era security apparatus, as president in 2024, prompting renewed debate among comparativists about whether the country's post-1998 democratic settlement rests on durable social foundations or on a more contingent elite bargain. Revisiting Moore's 1966 study, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, in this context is not an antiquarian exercise: it is an attempt to ask whether the class coalitions that produced democracy, fascism, or communism in early-modern Europe and Asia offer a usable lens for understanding why Indonesia democratized in 1998 yet continues to elect figures associated with its authoritarian past.
Moore's original argument identified three historical routes to the modern state — a bourgeois-led path toward parliamentary democracy (England, France, the United States), a path in which a weak bourgeoisie allied with a reactionary landed class to produce fascism (Germany, Japan), and a peasant-based revolutionary path toward communism (Russia, China). Applying this typology to Indonesia requires confronting the country's distinct colonial economy: Dutch rule entrenched an agrarian structure organized around plantation production and an indigenous landed and bureaucratic elite (the priyayi) rather than an autonomous commercial bourgeoisie of the English type. The article's title suggests it treats Indonesia as a test, and likely a complication, of Moore's categories — the country's trajectory ran through Sukarno's Guided Democracy, General Suharto's military-backed New Order (1966–1998), and only then the 1998 Reformasi transition that followed the Asian Financial Crisis, a sequence that does not map neatly onto any of Moore's three classic routes and instead suggests a hybrid pattern in which the military and bureaucratic elite, not a bourgeoisie or peasantry, repeatedly determined the regime outcome.
This question connects to a broader body of political-economy scholarship on Indonesia that has long emphasized continuity over rupture. Vedi Hadiz and Richard Robison's work on the survival of New Order oligarchs after 1998, documented in their analysis of "Reorganising Power in Indonesia," showed that decentralization and electoral competition after Suharto's fall redistributed political access without dismantling the predatory coalitions of bureaucrats, military figures, and conglomerates built up over three decades of authoritarian rule. Placed alongside Moore's framework, this scholarship implies that Indonesia's democratization was less a bourgeois revolution against a landed class than an intra-elite reshuffling that preserved the New Order's underlying social coalition under new institutional forms. The 2024 election of Prabowo Subianto, who had served as Suharto's son-in-law and a special forces commander before reinventing himself as an elected civilian leader, is frequently cited by regional analysts as evidence that Indonesia's democratic institutions have not fully displaced the social forces Moore would associate with a reactionary, landed-military coalition.
For the ODA and civil-society research community, the significance of reopening Moore's framework lies in its challenge to institutionalist governance diagnostics used by donors such as the World Bank, UNDP, and USAID, which tend to measure democratic quality through elections, rule-of-law indices, and civil-society space rather than through the deeper class coalitions Moore prioritized. If Indonesia's democratic stability depends on an oligarchic settlement rather than a broad-based bourgeois or labor coalition, then governance-support programming focused narrowly on electoral administration or NGO capacity-building may be addressing symptoms rather than structure. This has direct relevance for donors operating in Indonesia's civil society sector, where land tenure disputes, labor organizing constraints, and the political weight of agribusiness and extractive conglomerates remain unresolved legacies of the agrarian structure Moore's framework foregrounds, and where Freedom House and V-Dem have both registered concerns about shrinking civic space since the mid-2010s even as formal electoral competition has continued uninterrupted.
Looking forward, researchers working in the Journal of Contemporary Asia tradition and practitioners designing civil-society or governance interventions in Southeast Asia have reason to treat Indonesia as an ongoing test case rather than a settled outcome. Moore's own framework was built on completed historical transitions in Europe and Asia; applying it to a still-evolving case like Indonesia, where a Suharto-linked figure now leads an elected government twenty-six years after Reformasi, means the analytical verdict remains open. Future comparative work would do well to extend this lens to other ASEAN states navigating similar tensions between electoral consolidation and the survival of military or oligarchic coalitions, including Thailand's recurrent coup cycles and Myanmar's 2021 reversal, so that donors and researchers can better distinguish democracies built on genuine coalition shifts from those, like Indonesia's, where the old social forces Moore described may simply have changed uniforms.