Just What is Iran?
As Iranians head to the polls today for presidential elections in apparently huge numbers, I wanted to throw out the question of whether political science actually has a good label for the Iranian regime. To greatly (and unfairly) simplify an enormous literature, we essentially have three working regime types these days. There are democracies, where leaders are elected in free and fair competitive elections. There are the classic non-democracies, ranging from autocracies to totalitarian states, where elections are either not held or only sham elections (e.g., only one party can compete) are permitted. Then there is the world’s newest, and increasingly popular, regime type, which Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have labeled competitive authoritarian regimes. Levitsky and Way define competitive authoritarian regimes by writing that:
In competitive authoritarian regimes, formal democratic institutions are widely viewed as the principal means of obtaining and exercising political authority. Incumbents violate those rules so often and to such an extent, however, that the regime fails to meet conventional minimum standards for democracy. Examples include Croatia under Franjo Tudjman, Serbia under Slobodan Miloševiæ, Russia under Vladimir Putin, Ukraine under Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma, Peru under Alberto Fujimori, and post-1995 Haiti, as well as Albania, Armenia, Ghana, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, and Zambia through much of the 1990s. Although scholars have characterized many of these regimes as partial or “diminished” forms of democracy, we agree with Juan Linz that they may be better described as a (diminished) form of authoritarianism (p.52)
Which brings us to Iran. In the New York Times alone, the front page of the paper leads with a headline stating In Iran, a Real Race, and Talk of a Sea Change, while the Op-Ed page has a headline referring to the current election as Iran’s Travesty. Three points seem especially salient:
1) Supreme executive power in Iran lies in the hands of the appropriately named Supreme Leader, currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is not popularly elected. However, the powers of the President are non-trivial.
2) The incumbent President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is running for reelection, has the support of Khamenei, plus, according to UPI, he “and his supporters control the state functions of government, which puts them at a huge advantage”
3) As of the time of this writing, no one knows who is going to win this election, and the campaign has apparently been very spirited.
So what does this mean for Iran’s regime type? Point 1 suggests a fairly typical non-democratic/authoritarian regime (which is accentuated by the fact the regime also tightly controls who can run for both executive and legislative office as well). Point 2 sounds like a fairly typical competitive authoritarian regime - there is an election, but the authorities have so much power that it is neither free nor fair. But what happens if the opposition candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, wins the election and the authorities respect the results? After all, it has happened before in Iran with the election of Mohammed Khatami in 1997. What exactly do we call Iran then? Does a simple authoritarian-theocracy capture it? Or does that miss the fact that apparently competitive elections can and do occur in this country, even if they are in many ways limited (but not completely controlled) by the authorities?
Comments
Josh, I think the problem you point to with classifying Iran highlights a broader problem of differentiating between institutions and the behavior they induce. The nature of “competitive authoritarian” regimes appears to be that they have authoritarian institutional features that aren’t exercised to their full. My sense is how one labels such regimes depends on what you are trying to explain. Minimalist definitions are best when trying to explain how institutional forms lead to certain outcomes. The “competitive authoritarian” label might be more useful when trying to explain what causes competitive elections to be held in the first place.
Posted by: James | June 12, 2009 03:07 PM
This sounds like a job for… Max Weber. These kinds of conundrums are much easier to deal with if one treats analytic types as ideal-typifications that, in turn, generate a property space of “mixed” types in which real cases reside. Many of these conundrums arise from treating analytic categories as filing boxes.
Posted by: Daniel Nexon | June 12, 2009 03:49 PM
I’ve long considered Iran to be the second most democratic country in the
Middle East (after Israel, and not counting Turkey as part of the ME).
In recent years, Lebanon and one might argue that Iraq have become more
democratic, but I’m not sure about how to account for the political
instability.
In terms of regime type, I would call it a limited or partial democracy. The elections that are held are truly contested and fairer than elections in Russia or most of the rest of the FSU. The use of administrative
resources is smaller than in a place like Georgia, much less Russia. At the same time, there are clear limits: 1) candidates are vetted and those considered anti-system excluded from the competition. One could
argue that the same thing occurs on a more limited scale in Germany, where Nazi parties are excluded, though of course the scale is much different in Iran. 2) The parliament and president are not the supreme authority. This is the part that makes Iran somewhat unique. I can’t think of another case where a truly powerful figure like the president is elected democratically but his decisions can be superseded by another individual. I still think this type of regime is more democratic than undemocratic, but clearly there are limits. It’s certainly more
democratic than countries like Jordan or Syria.
Actually, Lebanon prior to the anti-Syria “colored” revolution might be a good parallel. It had a democratic government, but Syria held veto power over major decisions. Khamenei is similar, but internal rather than external.
Posted by: Dmitry Gorenburg | June 12, 2009 04:07 PM
One further thought on Iran. Much will be made clear by the counting. If it’s really close, it’s possible that the election supervisors might seek to manipulate the results to ensure an Ahmadinejad victory. To the extent this happens, it will obviously undermine the fairness of the election and reduce the claim that Iran is a unique limited democracy in favor of just placing it in the competitive authoritarian category. I wonder about the chances of a “colored” revolution scenario in that
situation — per Josh’s theory, it should be relatively high. There’s a
galvanizing event (the election), highly mobilized protesters with resources, and the reformer candidate’s supporters are concentrated in urban areas, especially the capital. All conditions that could lead to mass protests.
Are there theories out there that predict when governments might repress such protests, vs. giving in?
Posted by: Dmitry Gorenburg | June 12, 2009 04:09 PM
Umm, how about a historical perspective? Iran looks a lot like the modernizing semi-authoritarian states of late nineteenth century Europe: The French Second Empire under Napoleon III or Wilhelmine Germany. There were elections, and there was competition for power within the various state institutions, but it was not open to everyone. There was an authority figure who had the final say, but he also saw the value of working through the institutional structures, including democratic ones.
Posted by: Matt L | June 12, 2009 04:42 PM
In my view Iran is merely a relatively open one-party system. The error in your analysis is in calling the “moderates” an “opposition”. They’re not an opposition. You can look at the presidential elections in Iran in the same way we look on the primaries in the US. All presidential candidates are vetted by the Supreme Leader. There is no option of electing someone who the authorities do not support: Those who run for office already have the acceptance of the religious leaders.
So we have a classical one-party system, with open competition for the leadership role. It’s a bit convoluted, but I don’t think it’s completely outside the scope of the existing categories.
Posted by: Dubi | June 14, 2009 09:16 AM