I agree with Josh Tucker that Iran doesn’t really fit the major categories of regime-type au currant in comparative politics, but, as I also suggest in comments, we should only lose sleep over that if we treat analytic types as filing boxes for cases rather than, say, as ideal-typifications. Still, if the analysis I’m seeing from reliable sources (and I, like Randy, have no idea what to make of the election outcome in Iran), it does seem that the regime engaged in some pretty brazen fraud of one form or another.
If that’s right, then we’re looking at a familiar dynamic: while most observers would have believed a fraudulent result that netted Ahmadinejad around 52-55% of the vote, the reported results just aren’t very credible. So why inflate margins in fraudulent elections?
Unfortunately, this isn’t a literature I know terribly well. But if what we see in the Russian case is generalizable–where no one doubted that the governing party would win, yet it still sought to inflate its margin of victory–such regimes seek greater “legitimacy” than a close election allows for. More generally, close results create more ambiguity as to the actual victor; indeed, as a non-Iran expert my initial reaction to the margin was “I guess that, whatever irregularities there might be, Mousavi must have lost.”
Still, assuming that the result was rigged, one has to wonder if the inflated margin here will actually backfire. It certainly seems to have produced incredulous reactions outside of Iran, let alone among opposition supporters in Iran
Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.
He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.
He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.
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