[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-05
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
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Indonesia's political trajectory has long served as a touchstone for comparative theories of regime change, and the publication of "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*" in the Journal of Contemporary Asia (2026, DOI 10.1080/00472336.2026.2697467) arrives at a moment when Southeast Asia's largest democracy is again under scrutiny. Indonesia's 2024 presidential election, which brought Prabowo Subianto to power, has reignited debate among scholars and development practitioners about whether the country's post-1998 Reformasi settlement is consolidating or eroding. Against this backdrop, revisiting Barrington Moore's classic comparative-historical sociology offers a way to situate Indonesia's contemporary political drift within a longer structural narrative rather than treating recent events as episodic news. The Journal of Contemporary Asia, a leading outlet for critical political economy research on the region, is a fitting venue for this kind of structural re-examination, since it has historically published work linking class formation, state capacity, and regime outcomes across Southeast and East Asia.
The core analytical move signaled by the title is to apply Moore's 1966 framework from "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy" — which traced divergent paths to the modern world (bourgeois democracy, fascism, and communism) through the relative strength of landed elites, the bourgeoisie, and the peasantry — to the Indonesian case specifically. Moore's central claim, distilled in the phrase "no bourgeoisie, no democracy," located democratic outcomes in the historical balance between commercializing agrarian classes and an independent urban bourgeoisie strong enough to check both absolutist landlords and the state. Applying this lattice to Indonesia invites an examination of how the country's plantation-based colonial economy, the military's entrenched political-economic role under Suharto's New Order (1966–1998), and the peculiar position of ethnic Chinese business elites — who accumulated capital without translating it into an autonomous political bourgeoisie — shaped a path that diverged sharply from the classical Western European sequence Moore described. The article's framing as "pathways," plural, suggests an argument that Indonesia's trajectory does not fit neatly into any one of Moore's three routes, but instead produced a hybrid outcome: a long authoritarian corporatist interlude under Suharto followed by a comparatively rapid, elite-negotiated democratic opening after 1998.
Read against broader regional and global trends in civil society and political economy, this inquiry resonates with ongoing debates about democratic backsliding across middle-income democracies. Indonesia's experience is frequently compared to other Southeast Asian states — Thailand's cycle of coups and elections, the Philippines' post-Marcos democratization, and Malaysia's dominant-party system — where, as in Moore's model, the absence of a politically independent bourgeoisie and the persistence of patrimonial networks have constrained liberal consolidation. The relevance of a Moore-based reading of Indonesia extends to the role of organized civil society: mass Islamic organizations such as Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah functioned historically as quasi-autonomous social forces that neither fully replicated Moore's European bourgeoisie nor aligned simply with landed or peasant interests, complicating any direct transposition of the original theory. This is precisely the kind of empirical friction that area-studies journals like the Journal of Contemporary Asia are positioned to surface, since it tests whether a mid-twentieth-century comparative framework, built from English, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian cases, retains explanatory power when extended to a Southeast Asian archipelagic state with a distinct colonial-plantation economy and a politically active military establishment.
For policy audiences and researchers working on ODA-adjacent governance and democracy-support programming, an analysis anchored in Moore's class-structural approach carries direct implications. Donor-funded democracy and civil-society strengthening initiatives in Indonesia — from USAID and the European Union's governance programs to multilateral support channeled through institutions engaging with Indonesian civil society organizations — have tended to assume that strengthening an independent middle class or civic sector will reliably produce democratic deepening, an assumption closely tracking Moore's bourgeoisie thesis. If the Journal of Contemporary Asia article demonstrates that Indonesia's democratic opening in 1998 was driven less by an ascendant independent bourgeoisie than by elite bargaining among military, party, and business factions amid the Asian Financial Crisis, this would caution against programming models that treat middle-class growth as a sufficient condition for democratic resilience. It would instead point toward the importance of institutional checks on the military's residual political-economic footprint and on oligarchic party financing, both long-standing concerns in scholarship on Indonesian political economy following Golkar's dominance and the persistence of dynastic and patronage politics within parties such as PDI-P.
Looking forward, the value of returning to Barrington Moore in 2026 lies in offering researchers and practitioners a structural counterweight to purely institutionalist or electoral-cycle accounts of why Indonesian democracy is perceived to be under strain following Prabowo Subianto's ascent. Practitioners designing governance and civil-society support should treat this comparative-historical lens as a prompt to examine who, structurally, has an enduring material stake in open political competition in Indonesia today, rather than assuming that electoral procedures alone sustain democratic pathways. For scholars, the article's reengagement with a nearly sixty-year-old theoretical framework through a contemporary Southeast Asian case suggests a continuing appetite within the Journal of Contemporary Asia and cognate venues for testing canonical comparative-historical sociology against newer regional data, and it opens an agenda for further comparative work examining whether Moore's typology, or some revised version of it, can account for the divergent democratic trajectories of Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines in the decades following their respective authoritarian exits.