Measuring Populism in Iran and How It Relates to Recent Protests

• In Event: Political Attitudes and Public Opinion in the Middle East

Abstract

Iran has experienced multiple waves of large-scale unrest over the past decade, but the underlying causes of these unrests are not well understood. While there are identifiable trigger points for each episode, the attitudinal changes taking place beneath the surface of Iranian politics have generally escaped scholarly attention.

In this study, we attempt to measure populism in Iran using elements of a nationally representative survey collected in March 2022, six months before protests erupted in the fall. We identify two distinct dimensions that can be named anti-establishmentism and anti-elitism. We examine the correlates of these two dimensions. As expected, there is a strong relationship between anti-establishmentism and media consumption diet, but anti-establishmentism is also weakly positively correlated with education and living in larger cities. We then use these factors as explanatory variables to see how they relate to a range of attitudes. Among the two, while anti-elitism does not provide much explanatory power, we see that anti-establishmentism is very powerful in explaining political attitudes, even when we control for demographic variables and other political variables. Especially noteworthy is that anti-establishmentism significantly improves our models for attitudes towards “mandatory hijab”, even when we control for belief in political Islam and belief in hijab. We find that even the so-called reformist politicians cannot escape the wrath of those high on the anti-establishment scale. These results help us better understand the dynamics of Iranian politics and in particular shed light on the most recent wave of protests in Iran that followed the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody.

Author

• Ali Sanaei, University of Chicago