An Anti-Party Politics: The Institutional Weakness of Political Parties in Iran

Moving beyond over-simplified dichotomy of liberal democracies VS authoritarian regimes, the Iranian political system is also characterised by a mix features of democracy and autocracy. At least, both the Government and the Parliament are established based on elections. However, while there are several official political parties have long existed, almost none of them have ever perceived politically important during electoral campaigns. In the most recent instance, all six presidential candidates, participated in the last electoral debates in June this year, publicly denied any kind of affiliation with political parties. The fact that not only shows the practical irrelevance of official parties in electoral competition, but also reflects the extent that party politics is normatively illegitimate in the Iranian society. Having studied 655 political positions in various post-revolutionary governments and parliaments, this study shows that a large proportion of political appointees have never had a formal affiliation with political parties. Instead, it shows that a set of originally non-political institutions, including some universities, specific public departments, and a few religious or pressure groups have successfully filled the gap and proved politically competent to win elections. However, having developed a framework to characterise political institutions, the paper argues that at the absence of professional political parties, those alternative institutions have never fulfilled other, particularly non-electoral, functions of the parties. In fact they have deliberately limited their political function as just temporary electoral campaigns, though without any form of political continuity and responsibility beyond electoral periods. The study concludes that in such an anti-party politics, apart from elections, the political system as a whole has long suffered from the lack of political institutionalisation. By this, the paper provides an overview of a distinctive form of party politics in an extensively understudied socio-political context.