On the cusp of its fortieth anniversary, the Islamic Republic is embroiled in a significant crisis of representation. A few months after presidential and local council elections with high participation, widespread protests erupted across the country in early winter 2018, voicing discontent with the Islamic Republic itself. In this paper we investigate this apparent paradox between participation in formal institutions of representation, and the seeming rejection of the regime by the same voting population during protests. Why do Iranians continue to vote in an array of local and national elections when recurring popular protests (most spectacularly during the 2009 Green Movement, and the 2018 mainly provincial protests) seem to indicate that existing institutions are deemed unresponsive to popular needs and demands? Since 1979 Iranians have simultaneously engaged and worked through institutional fora that claim to represent the popular will and the ideals of the Revolution. This does not always mean that they are fully vested in the formal electoral politics and institutions or identify with politicians or parties. We outline the structural limits of the existing elected institutions - the presidency, the majlis, local councils; and juxtapose their performance against the popular expectations that animated the 1979 Revolution. Some of the same people who vote and even run for office, have used localized civil disobedience and claims-making to protest . We then investigate the causes and dynamics of the 2018 protests by placing them within a longer historical context as well as a broader repertoire of political practices in the post-revolution era. While scattered public protests against various grievances have become a routine recurrence, the scale and ferocity of the recent protests were unprecedented. They were widespread, mainly in provincial towns, and expressed a wide range of grievances. Given the systemic repression of autonomous political parties and associations, these grievances were articulated in fleeting slogans and short-lived acts of defiance, rather than expressed in formal demands. We will examine case studies to demonstrate that recent protests were not organized, univocal, or an extension of elite factionalism. Neither can the common thread in both these demonstrations and electoral choices be reduced to the conventional “society versus state” explanation. Rather, the motivating force behind both these political decisions to participate in elections, and express discontent through public demonstrations, is ongoing struggles by a postrevolutionary society to maintain the 1979 revolution’s promises of social justice, material well-being, and representative government.