Incompatible Mindset: the culture of compromise among political elites in modern history of Iran

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 department of sociology shahid beheshti university

2 post-doc researcher at Tehran university

10.30510/psi.2022.338408.3370

Abstract

Relationships between political elites, due to their various aspects, are of great importance in political sociology. However, in Iran’s modern history studies, such relationships are reduced to personal traits and characteristics and do not pay attention to structural aspects. This paper is focused on elites compromise in modern history of Iran and addresses questions including: whether the elites relationships are based on a specific model or not?. why elites couldn’t stay committed to their alliance after achieving the primary aims and always after a short cooperation, there is a big gap among them?. For answering these questions, two opposite situations should be distinguished: movement situation and partly-democratic situation. The results reveal that coalition has always occurred in a non-democratic and movement situations. In fact, a common enemy, that often is the governed elites, makes the alliance imperative to reach goals for opposite elites. In contrast, rival elites have never compromised when faced weakened enemy, a situation which would have resulted in a partly-democratic situation. The most important reasons of non-compromised state in post-movement or partly-democratic situation are: the nature of coalition, ideological gaps between elites, elites’ power resources and elites’ network of connections, and political culture of elites’ incompatible mindset.

Keywords

Political Sociology of Iran
Volume 5, Issue 11
January 2023
Pages 5818-5832

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