Oil and Gas Privatization in Iran by Molavi Reza;

Author:Molavi, Reza;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Garnet Publishing (UK) Ltd
Published: 2014-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

Features of the political system

As discussed earlier, Iran’s political complexity comes from a blend of modern Islamic theocracy with elements of the popular sovereignty of democracies. This is reflected in the type of institutions that co-exist in Iranian society: a network of unelected institutions controlled by the extremely powerful conservative supreme leader is countered by a president and parliament elected by the people. The purpose in highlighting this is to demonstrate the multiplicity of the decisionmaking bodies within the government which have varying degrees of political will in reforming the existing institutions in Iran.

Figure 4.1 on the next page illustrates the hierarchical composition of the system and its division into elected and unelected institutions in relation to each other (Buchta, 2000; BBC, 2005b). This separation of power becomes more pronounced after 1989 due to the disconnection of power of the institution of the president from that of the supreme leader.

The fact that there were two centres of power – one elected, the other unelected – accounted for the persistent disjunction between state and society and for the endemic political factionalism. The last two features continued to play a crucially important role in the determination of Iranian politics, as will become clear in the next sections. Such a political landscape was bound to have a significant effect on the political economy of privatisation in Iran. Iranian politics has been moving towards a distinction between conservative and liberal views of the world – a distinction which has arisen not just in Iran but in many nations around the world, particularly in the Middle East. Thus, while the argument here begins by focusing on the continuity with the previous eras that we have explored above, the final conclusions will be based on this conservative–liberal breakdown, one which has affected not only internal politics, but also the arguments regarding foreign and economic policies, especially those related to the potential for privatisation of the nationalised state industries.

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