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A system explainer built from country metadata, linked institutions, office timelines, elections, and parties.
Iran operates under a islamic republic (theocratic-presidential hybrid) system in the current dataset.
Iran is tracked in PoliticaHub as a islamic republic (theocratic-presidential hybrid), which gives the page a baseline answer to how executive and legislative authority are arranged.
Executive power is inferred here from current office timelines and the country's connected offices rather than a richer constitutional note.
Current head of state: Masoud Pezeshkian.
No legislature name is recorded yet, so the institutional picture relies more heavily on connected offices and institutions.
4 institutions are linked to Iran, which helps map the legislature, executive bodies, or other constitutional actors around the state.
132 parties are connected to Iran, giving this system page a party-system layer rather than treating institutions in isolation.
The most recent linked election is Iran 2024 Presidential Election, and it acts as the best available marker of how the present balance of power was produced.
Iran operates the world's only theocratic republic — a system where competitive elections, an elected parliament, and a directly elected president coexist with an unelected Supreme Leader, a Guardian Council that vetoes candidates and legislation, and a revolutionary ideology that treats popular sovereignty and divine authority as simultaneously operative.
Iran matters for comparative politics because it is the most institutionally complex authoritarian regime in the world and the most important case for understanding how competitive elections can function within a system explicitly designed to prevent democratic outcomes from challenging the ruling ideology. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has maintained a constitutional order that combines republican institutions — a directly elected president, an elected parliament (Majles), municipal councils, and the Assembly of Experts — with theocratic institutions that hold ultimate authority: the Supreme Leader, the Guardian Council, the Expediency Discernment Council, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The interaction between these two pillars produces a form of managed political competition where genuine factional struggle exists, but only within boundaries set by the clerical establishment.
For comparative scholars, Iran defies easy categorization. It is not a totalitarian state — factional competition between reformists, moderates, principalists, and hardliners is real, and election outcomes have produced sharply different governance approaches across presidencies. But it is not a democracy either — the Guardian Council's vetting power allows it to disqualify candidates it deems insufficiently loyal to the Islamic Republic, the Supreme Leader can override any elected institution, and the IRGC operates as both a military force and an economic empire largely outside civilian oversight. Iran is best understood as a competitive authoritarian regime with theocratic characteristics, where the ruling system uses elections to generate legitimacy, manage elite conflict, and calibrate popular pressure without ever permitting a genuine challenge to the foundational principle of velayat-e faqih (guardianship of the Islamic jurist).
The Iranian constitution creates what scholars call a dual state: a formal government elected by citizens, and a deep state controlled by the Supreme Leader and revolutionary institutions. The Supreme Leader — currently Ali Khamenei, who has held the position since 1989 — is the most powerful individual in the system. He commands the armed forces, controls the judiciary, appoints the head of state broadcasting, sets the strategic direction of foreign and nuclear policy, and has final say over all matters of state. He is formally selected by the Assembly of Experts, an elected body of senior clerics, but in practice the Guardian Council's ability to vet candidates for the Assembly means that the selection process is circular: institutions controlled by the Supreme Leader choose the body that is supposed to hold him accountable.
The elected president serves as head of government and runs the executive branch, but operates within constraints that no democratic executive faces. The president cannot set foreign policy, has limited authority over the security services, and can see policies blocked by the Guardian Council, the Expediency Council, or direct intervention from the Supreme Leader's office. Yet the presidency is not meaningless — the differences between the Khatami, Ahmadinejad, Rouhani, and Raisi presidencies were real, particularly on economic management, social policy, and diplomatic posture. The 2024 election of Masoud Pezeshkian, a relative reformist, after Raisi's death in a helicopter crash, demonstrated that the system still uses presidential elections to adjust its tone and manage internal pressures, even when the structural constraints on presidential authority remain unchanged.
