ABSTRACT
INDONESIA is one of the most striking examples in the Asia-Pacific region of a low-income country whose rapid economic growth since 1966--67 has pushed its political system not toward democratization but toward authoritarianism and a powerful, autonomous state. The steady economic development that has occurred under President Suharto's "New Order" since 1966, boosted greatly by the oil bonanza of the 1970s, has enormously strengthened the power and governing capacities of the state, at the expense of previously vigorous society-based forces. Until about 1986 economic growth gave rise to a highly patrimonialist, authoritarian regime in which key policymaking authority and control over the allocation of crucial resources were becoming concentrated increasingly at the apex of the political system---and essentially in the hands of Suharto himself, or his close associates (Crouch 1979; Liddle 1985, 1996; Schwartz 1994). This enabled the state authorities to reduce to near impotence the few independent clusters of countervailing power in the society that might otherwise have been capable of opposing or challenging the state's authority, as had often happened before 1965.
