[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-13
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
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Indonesia's political trajectory has returned to the center of comparative democratization debates at a moment when global assessments of democratic resilience are increasingly pessimistic. As the world's third-largest democracy by population and the largest Muslim-majority state to hold competitive elections, Indonesia offers an unusually rich test case for theories about why some societies consolidate pluralist institutions while others slide toward authoritarian rule or fragile hybrid regimes. The forthcoming Journal of Contemporary Asia article "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore" situates this question within one of the most influential frameworks in comparative-historical sociology, and its appearance in 2026 coincides with heightened scrutiny of Indonesia's governance trajectory following the 2024 presidential transition to Prabowo Subianto, a former general whose rise has revived long-standing questions about the durability of civilian-led, post-authoritarian institutions built after 1998.
The article's title signals an explicit engagement with Barrington Moore's landmark 1966 study, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, which argued that the political destiny of nations is shaped less by culture or ideology than by the historical alignment of class coalitions — particularly the relationship between landed elites, an emerging bourgeoisie, and the peasantry — during the transition from agrarian to industrial economies. Applying that lens to Indonesia invites a reconsideration of the country's own long arc: from the extractive agrarian structures established under Dutch colonial rule, through Sukarno's "Guided Democracy" of the 1950s and 1960s, into the thirty-two-year authoritarian New Order under Suharto (1966–1998), and finally into the post-Reformasi democratic opening that followed Suharto's fall. By framing Indonesia as a "pathway" case rather than a fixed outcome, the article's title suggests that Moore's class-coalition logic remains analytically useful for explaining why Indonesia neither fully replicated the liberal-democratic route Moore associated with England and the United States nor collapsed into the fascist or communist alternatives he identified in interwar Germany and revolutionary Russia and China, but instead produced a distinctive sequence of authoritarian consolidation followed by a still-contested democratic transition.
This revisiting of Moore's framework arrives alongside a broader regional and global reassessment of democratic trajectories in which Southeast Asia features prominently. Scholars such as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have documented democratic backsliding across multiple regions, and Southeast Asia supplies some of the starkest comparative cases: Thailand's repeated cycles of coups and electoral restoration, Myanmar's 2021 military takeover reversing a decade of liberalization, and the Philippines' own struggles with oligarchic dynastic politics under presidents from Ferdinand Marcos to his son Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. Indonesia's case is distinct precisely because its 1998 Reformasi produced one of the region's more durable electoral democracies, yet persistent oligarchic control over land, natural resources, and party financing — a legacy traceable to the agrarian class structures Moore's theory foregrounds — has constrained the depth of that democratization. This tension between formal electoral competition and entrenched elite coalitions is a recurring theme in civil society and political-economy scholarship on ODA-recipient states, where donor-funded governance programs often confront the same structural constraints that comparative-historical sociology identifies at the macro level.
For researchers and practitioners engaged in ODA and governance programming, the article's significance lies in reconnecting contemporary Indonesian politics to a structural, long-durée analytical tradition rather than treating recent developments — such as the 2024 election or ongoing debates over Indonesia's anti-corruption institutions — as isolated events. Development agencies, including those managing civil-society strengthening and decentralization programs in Indonesia, have frequently framed democratic consolidation as a matter of institutional design: electoral administration, judicial independence, or freedom-of-information regimes. A Moore-inflected reading instead directs attention to the underlying coalition of landed, resource-extractive, and bureaucratic-military elites that has persisted in varying forms from the colonial plantation economy through the New Order's crony capitalism to present-day resource politics in sectors such as palm oil and nickel mining. This has direct implications for how institutions designing governance and civil-society support — whether multilateral development banks, bilateral agencies, or research observatories such as IOCSS — assess the sustainability of reforms: programs that strengthen formal institutions without addressing the material bases of elite power may produce procedural democracy without transforming the deeper coalition structures that determine its resilience.
Looking forward, the reintroduction of Barrington Moore's framework into Indonesian studies through this Journal of Contemporary Asia article suggests a productive research agenda for scholars working at the intersection of political economy and democratization studies: tracing how specific sectors — agrarian land tenure, extractive industries, and party finance — reproduce or disrupt the class coalitions Moore identified as decisive. For practitioners monitoring Indonesia's trajectory under the Prabowo administration, the comparative-historical approach offers a caution against reading any single election as either a confirmation of democratic consolidation or an irreversible slide toward authoritarianism; instead, it points to the slower-moving coalition dynamics among military, bureaucratic, and business elites that will likely determine whether Indonesia's democratic institutions deepen or continue to coexist uneasily with oligarchic continuity. As comparative democratization research increasingly revisits mid-twentieth-century theoretical touchstones to make sense of twenty-first-century backsliding, Indonesia's case — explicitly engaged through Moore's own categories in this 2026 publication — stands as a significant data point for both area-studies specialists and the broader community of scholars and donors tracking the fate of democratic governance across the Global South.