The translation is: “The image”
Ali Asghar Ramazanpour

Since Samuel Huntington introduced the theory of the third wave of democracy in 1991, the issue of Iran and its exemplification in the wave of democratization and backsliding has been a complex one. The third wave theory was based on the emergence of 30 new democracies between 1974 and 1990, which doubled the number of democracies in the world. Huntington emphasized five global factors in the third wave of democracy: deepening crisis of legitimacy in authoritarian regimes, global economic growth in the 1960s and rising living standards, crisis in the power of the Catholic Church and the emergence of Christian movements advocating democratization, changes in the policies of global powers such as the US and the Soviet Union, and the domino effect (or, as Huntington put it, the snowball effect) that caused patterns of democratization around the world to influence each other. Huntington’s optimistic emphasis on global factors leading to the emergence of democracies led liberal democracy advocates to pay less attention

The Guardian Council, as the axis of managing the competition among the ruling elites based on models used for transitioning from democracy, can be seen as a type of return to competition among ruling elites. These elites have created political and security institutions to prevent any disruption to their power and protect themselves from waves of democratic changes. Among these institutions, the most important one formed by these ruling elites was the Guardian Council. In the first and second parliamentary elections, the Guardian Council was the result of a coalition of all the forces supporting Ayatollah Khomeini and served as a means to prevent the presence of left-leaning forces, liberals, and religious nationalists in the parliament and their use of electoral institutions. However, from the third parliament onwards, the Guardian Council played a role in managing the competition among the main factions of ruling elites. This role continued until the 2016 parliamentary and Assembly of Experts elections. From this perspective, the Guardian Council can be seen as the main axis of managing the competition among ruling elites

The transformation in the position of the Guardian Council has gone through three stages so far. In the first stage, the Guardian Council eliminated most critics of the main power factions. In the second stage – since the third parliamentary elections in 1367 (1988) and the emergence of the issue of supervising the expediency of the Guardian Council – the Guardian Council became the main arena of competition between the two dominant factions and gradually came under the control of the conservatives and traditionalists. In the third stage – since the seventh parliamentary elections in 1382 (2003) – the Guardian Council, under the leadership of Ali Khamenei, practically became fully involved in engineering the elections and became organizationally and operationally extensive. During this time, the Guardian Council, especially its secretary Ahmad Jannati, became the spokesperson for the ruling power and played the role of coordinating between the conservatives and hardliners.

With the announcement of general election policies in October 2016 by Ali Khamenei, it seems that the Guardian Council has entered a new phase where its supervision over the performance of parliament members after the approval of their credentials is the first sign of this. Figures such as Ali Motahari and some lawyers have rightly argued that the country’s laws are in conflict with the extension of the Guardian Council’s oversight over parliament members during their term. However, it seems that Article 13 of the election policies has addressed this possibility. This is why the spokesperson for the Guardian Council has explicitly referred to the necessity of the Guardian Council’s supervision over parliament members after the publication of these policies. Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei, the spokesperson for the Guardian Council, said in explaining Article 13 of the election policies, “Based on the Guardian Council’s supervisory discretion, the Council has this supervision during the four-year term, but what was being implemented was that the Guardian Council had authority until the

Explanation:

• For an explanation about the study of the emergence of democracies in the third wave of democracy and the trends of regime change, refer to: Dictators and Democrats: Masses, Elites, and Regime Change by Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman, published by Princeton University Press in 2016.