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Political Party Development in Iran

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Richard W. Cottam
Richard W. Cottam*
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
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Extract

The period of reasonably free and vigorous political party activity in Iran was remarkably brief when viewed in the perspective of the very long history of that ancient land. Beginning slowly after the abdication of Reza Shah in 1941, party activity became steadily more intense until August 1953 when it was suddenly suppressed. But as brief as this period was, these twelve years witnessed patterns of political party development which deserve comparison with the experience of other developing states.

The term “developing” has been in vogue throughout the post-World War II era. But for all that the term remains a vague one. Why Iran with its recorded history of over twenty five hundred years should be classified as “developing” while the United States with a history of less than two hundred years should be classified as “developed” is not immediately obvious.

Type
Research Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , Summer 1968 , pp. 82 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1968

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Footnotes

1

An earlier and more condensed version of this paper was presented at a Seminar on “Problems of Contemporary Iran,” sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, and the Iranian Students Association in the United States, April 16-17, 1965.

References

Footnotes

2 This point has no better illustration for Iran than in the suggestion of Thomas Schelling that the sophisticated and complex Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq might respond to child psychology. Schelling, Thomas C., The Strategy of Conflict (New York, 1963) p. 13.Google Scholar

3 Riggs, Fred W., Administration in Developing Countries: The Theory of Prismatic Society (Boston, 1964).Google Scholar

4 It is one of the ironies of American social science studies of developing states that this very common phenomenon is so frequently understressed. Since the perceptual frame of the analyst will inevitably color to some extent the view of another political culture, an exaggeration of the attraction of liberal democratic values might reasonably be expected. Instead, the opposite appears to be true. But this underestimation of liberal-democratic attachments may well best be explained as a consequence of perceptual distortion resulting from a determining perception of American national interest. Even with optimal success, the liberal-democratic elite in the early stages of development can achieve only tenuous stability. And the avoidance of instability in developing states which have the misfortune of being on the Sino-Soviet littoral is generally assumed to be in the American interest. American policy makers seem to prefer an authoritarian regime which can maintain at least a comforting surface stability in such areas to the democratic regime whose surface appearance will frequently be chaotic. The downgrading of liberal democratic attachments may therefore be in large part a rationalizing of a national policy stance. In Iran it amounted to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

5 See N. Marbery Efimenco, “An Experiment with Civilian Dictatorship in Iran: The Case of Mohammad Mossadeq,” Journal of Politics. August 1955, p. 396.

6 This point was made at the Harvard Conference on Iran, April 1965 by Hossein Mahdavy during the discussion of his paper “Iran's Agrarian Problems”. He reported that in the course of making a survey of thirty villages the Iranian survey team had found universal familiarity with the name of Dr. Mossadeq.