What kind of regime does Iran have?
Joshua Tucker professor of political science at NYU, writing on the blog, "The Monkey Cage," asks the question. He also asks whether political scientists have an adequate conceptual vocabulary to describe the Iranian regime.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.
[W]e essentially have three working regime types these days. There are democracies... There are the classic non-democracies... Then there is the world’s newest, and increasingly popular, regime type, which Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have labeled competitive authoritarian regimes...
So what does this mean for Iran’s regime type?... 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?
The name of the blog, "The Monkey Cage," comes from an H. L. Mencken quote, "Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage."
Labels: concepts, Iran, regime
posted by Ken Wedding @ 12:55 PM
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