In tutelary democracies, two inimical visions of government – guardianship and democracy – co-exist in a hybrid arrangement. Drawing on insights from the presidentialism versus parliamentarism debate, this paper examines the dynamics of competition between the guardians and popular challengers to their authority in two tutelary democracies: The Islamic Republic of Iran, which features a presidential arrangement under the guardianship of a supreme clerical authority, and Turkey, where until recently parliamentary democracy was constrained by military tutelage. I argue that the executive branch of government lies at the heart of the foundational tension of tutelary democracies: whereas guardians strive to limit the political authority of elected officials by dividing executive power into competing institutions and reserving exclusive prerogatives for themselves, elected challengers strive to push back by popularising and personalising – i.e. “presidentialising” – the executive office. However, as tracing the institutional evolution of the two regimes demonstrates, institutional engineering by the guardians does not always produce intended results, and the victory of popular contenders over tutelary actors does not guarantee consolidation of liberal democracy.

While in the last 40 years, Iran has witnessed rapid urbanization, the country’s legislative electoral system has not undergone corresponding changes. Iran’s large cities have faced electoral malapportionment, or a discrepancy between the share of legislative seats assigned to a geographical area and the area’s share of the population. This unequal voting weight has had political ramifications for local politics in rural and urban areas. In 1977 more than 52% of Iran’s population was living in rural areas, whereas the 2016 census showed that 74% of Iran’s population was residing in urban areas. Although there has been a long-standing bias in the design of Iran’s legislative electoral system, postrevolutionary adjustments have done little to adjust the geography of representation in accordance with the rapid population growth in many urban centers.  According to the 2016 census, about half of Iran’s urban population lives in the country’s top 20 largest cities. However, these urban centers have not gained an equal vote weight in the legislative electoral system. The malapportionment in Iran’s legislative electoral system has also resulted in the underrepresentation of certain ethnoreligious groups, such as Sunnis in Sistan va Baluchistan. This study attempts to shed light on the consequence of malapportionment at the national and local levels. At the national level the important question is, Why has the Iranian government been unwilling to reform the legislative electoral system and favor an electoral bias that dilutes the electoral weight of the urban centers, which are the locus of stronger opposition? At the local level this study investigates how malapportionment has changed the nature of local competitions and voter turnout.

This paper documents the perspective of the civil society organizations (CSOs) on the National Dialogue Conference (NDC) in Yemen. NDC was organized in 2013 as a unique event without precedent in the region in both scale and reach which was intended to draw the country back from the brink of violent conflict. Despite all efforts by the internal parties and the international community, the dialogue failed to avert war which broke out shortly after. Through interviews with 50 CSOs, covering all of the country’s governorates and a systematic review of the international documents written by experts on the Yemeni NDC, this study aims to identify the reasons that have led to the failure of NDC from the perspectives of the CSOs and the international expert, as well as to identify the strengths, weakness and lessons of the NDC. Half of the selected CSOs were directly involved in the NDC, either as invited participant or performing a supportive role. The other half were considered as outside observers. This study found some aspects that CSOs agreed on, but there was some strong disagreement which was based on the status of CSOs mainly insider/outsider. In contrast to the view adopted in the international literature, the CSOs are united in their perception that, in spite of all its procedural and substantive flaws, the NDC was a revolutionary and inevitable stepping-stone towards peace and stability and laid the groundwork for future dialoguing.

The Iranian Green Movement of 2009, largely a response to the disputed presidential election of June, 2009, disturbed the establishment political agenda-setters in the country, and shifted the political positionality of Iranian reformists within the country’s polity. Not only were some conservative factions pushed to the far right, but also a few reformist players became radicalized. Former prime minister of the country in 1980s, Mir Hossein Mousavi became the de facto leader of the most radical movement that Iran had ever experienced after the 1979 revolution. This paper analyzes the changing perceptions of Musavi in Iranian conservative media from the rise of the Reform Movement in 1997 till the Green Movement of 2009 and beyond. Right after Mohammad Khatami’s ascent to presidency in 1997, far-right periodicals (i.e., Shalamcheh and Jebheh) started disseminating Musavi’s left-leaning public talks, which had targeted newly elected reformists’ liberal economic and cultural policies. The nostalgia of 1980s and Musavi as a leftist prime minister in that decade was at the heart of far-right’s romance with Musavi in the early years of the Iranian Reform Movement (1997-2005). These perceptions, however, drastically changed when Musavi became the rising leader of the Green Movement in 2009. To Iranian far-right and center-right elites, 2009 Musavi had become an existential threat to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Since 2009, Iranian conservatives have been framing the Green Movement of 2009 as the “sedition” (Fitnah) and Musavi as the leader of this sedition. These shifting perceptions of Musavi in right-wing media help us to further our understanding of the changing positionality of political elites within the polity, as well as the fragility of alliance-formation and pact-making, in Iran in the past two decades. This research is mostly built on Iranian conservative media’s (newspapers, periodicals, and online news websites) stories about Musavi from 1997 till 2011.