Iran: A Theocratic-Republican Hybrid

Every system covered so far has been a monarchy of one kind or another — real elected chambers sitting somewhere alongside a ruling family, with the family always holding the final word. Iran is this course's first genuinely different structural category: a system that is, by its own constitution's own design, built to hold two separate sources of legitimacy at once — a fully elected President and Majlis, and an unelected Supreme Leader and Guardian Council standing above them. Neither half is a formality. Understanding Iran means understanding exactly where each one's real power starts and stops.

1979: A Revolution, and a Constitution Built to Hold Two Kinds of Legitimacy

Iran's 1979 revolution replaced a hereditary monarchy, the Pahlavi shah, with a system its own architects deliberately named a theocratic-republican one — not a monarchy replaced by an ordinary republic, and not a monarchy replaced by unchecked clerical rule, but a real, constitutionally built combination of both. On 1 April 1979, a national referendum approved turning Iran into an Islamic Republic; the new constitution was adopted on 24 October 1979 and became the country's effective law on 3 December 1979. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolution's own dominant figure, became the country's first Supreme Leader in December of that same year.

The Elected Half: President and Majlis

Iran's President is directly elected to a four-year term, limited to two consecutive terms, and — since a real 1989 change covered later in this chapter — serves as the country's own chief executive, with no separate Prime Minister sitting above the cabinet. The Islamic Consultative Assembly, universally known as the Majlis, is a 290-seat unicameral parliament, also elected to four-year terms, with five of those seats permanently reserved for named religious minorities — Zoroastrians, Jews, and Assyrian/Chaldean and Armenian Christians.

Political Theory Fundamentals' own Chapter 8 covers how electoral system design genuinely shapes real outcomes, and Iran's Majlis is worth reading against the two electoral systems this course has already covered: Jordan's own open-list proportional representation (Chapter 2). Iran uses a genuinely different real mechanism — most Majlis seats are filled by a two-round majoritarian vote in single- or multi-member constituencies, a district-based, candidate-by-candidate system rather than a party-list one. Real, competitive multi-candidate elections do happen inside these districts — the genuine limits on that competition sit one level up, in who is allowed to stand at all.

The Unelected Half: Supreme Leader and the Guardian Council

The Supreme Leader — Khomeini until his 1989 death, Ali Khamenei since — is not directly elected by the public at all. Chosen and, formally, removable by the Assembly of Experts (covered in the next section), the Supreme Leader holds real, extensive constitutional powers: commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the power to appoint the head of the judiciary, the heads of state radio and television, and the commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and — through the mechanism below — a real, decisive influence over who is even allowed to compete in the country's own elections.

The Assembly of Experts: A Real Election to Choose the Body's Own Overseer

The Assembly of Experts is an 88-member clerical body, directly elected by the public to real eight-year terms, with one constitutional job that sits above every other office covered so far: electing the Supreme Leader, and — at least on paper — being able to remove one it judges no longer qualified.

The Expediency Discernment Council: Breaking Deadlock Outside the Elected/Unelected Divide

By 1987, real, repeated conflict between the reformist-leaning Majlis of the day and the more conservative Guardian Council had brought parts of Iran's own legislative process to a genuine standstill — the Council routinely vetoing Majlis bills as incompatible with Islamic law or the constitution, with no formal mechanism to resolve the disagreement either way. Khomeini himself ordered the creation of the Expediency Discernment Council by decree on 6 February 1988, specifically to mediate exactly this kind of Majlis-Guardian Council impasse; the body was written into the constitution as a permanent institution during the 1989 amendments covered next.

1989: A Constitution Rewritten Around a Real Succession Crisis

Khomeini had originally designated Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri as his own successor — but Montazeri broke with Khomeini over the regime's own human-rights record in the late 1980s, and was removed from the succession before Khomeini's death. When Khomeini died on 3 June 1989 with no agreed-upon senior religious successor in place, Iran faced a real, structural problem the original 1979 constitution had not actually anticipated.

A national referendum approved these amendments on 28 July 1989, and Khamenei — already serving as President at the time of Khomeini's death — became Iran's second Supreme Leader that same year, under eligibility rules genuinely rewritten to make his own succession possible.

A Real, Recent Case of Turnover Within the Boundaries

Elected and Unelected, Side by Side

What Comes Next

Chapter 5 moves to a genuinely different real trajectory — Turkey's own shift from a conventional parliamentary republic toward a strengthened, directly elected executive presidency, following the real 2017 constitutional referendum.

Hands-On Exercises