Who speaks for Iran?

Posted on March 10, 2026 by Hanspeter Rosenlechner

An open letter to the Iran diaspora

The Islamic Republic is collapsing. What comes next will be determined not only by what happens inside Iran, but by whether those outside it can demonstrate something the regime never could: the ability to put Iran before themselves.

What is currently visible in the diaspora is not encouraging. Monarchists and republicans, MEK supporters and secular leftists, Kurdish federalists and Persian nationalists — each group convinced of its own mandate, each dismissing the others’ legitimacy. Reza Pahlavi draws on popular acclaim. Maryam Rajavi draws on decades of organization and international recognition. Others draw on ideology, on exile networks, on foreign backing. All claim to represent the Iranian people.

None of them do. Not because their intentions are wrong, but because representation cannot be claimed. It must be demonstrated.

This is precisely where the Arab Spring failed. In Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria — every transition collapsed not because of the old regime, but because the legitimacy vacuum was filled by competing factions fighting for power, each convinced its mandate was sufficient. The result was not democracy but a new cycle of authoritarianism, civil war, or chaos. Iran faces the same structural danger. And the diaspora’s current fragmentation is not a preview of Iranian democracy. It is a preview of its failure.

There is one question that cuts through every claim to legitimacy: Would you accept an outcome you did not shape?

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Filed under: Deliberation, Elections, Sortition | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

On the legitimacy of citizen assemblies

Posted on September 7, 2020 by Pierre-Etienne Vandamme

Dear Kleroterians,

I am currently writing on the legitimacy that grounds sortition-based representation in general, and citizen assemblies in particular. Not the perceived legitimacy of citizen assemblies (whether people actually see them as legitimate or not), but the reasons that we might have to see the decisions of such asssemblies as binding.

I realize that you have thought about this much more than I have. And this is why I would be interested in having your opinion on the three following questions:

  1. What are the potential sources of legitimacy for citizen assemblies, besides political equality, representativeness, impartiality and ordinarity?
  2. Among these different potential sources of legitimacy, which one(s) do you see as the most important?

    3. Finally, because I am expecting many of you to highlight representativeness as the main source of legitimacy, I add a third question:

  3. Would you say that a citizen assembly of 50 to 100 participants, with optional participation, still has some legitimacy? Would your opinion be different with stratified sampling?

Thank you very much for your input! I will make sure to credit the Blog if a publication comes out of this!

Filed under: Sortition | Tagged: , , | 99 Comments »

Sortition and Legitimate Coercion

Posted on March 30, 2015 by Ahmed R. Teleb

In an address called “What is Political Science For?” at the 2013 American Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting, APSA President Jane Mansbridge mentioned sortition as one of the new areas being studied for grounding legitimacy. She referenced Fishkin & Ober in her footnote to the statement. The thrust of her talk is that political scientists (democratic theorists especially) should turn their focus away from preventing tyranny and towards creating “legitimate coercion” because the world is facing rather formidable collective action problems that cannot be solved otherwise. Together with Waldron’s “Political Political Theory” article it leads me to believe that there is some movement in the field towards the questions that we often discuss here on Equality by Lot. Below are some excerpts from the full article found here.

This address advances three ideas. First, political science as a discipline has a mandate to help human beings govern themselves. Second, within this mandate we should be focusing, more than we do now, on creating legitimate coercion. In a world of increasing interdependence we now face an almost infinite number of collective action problems created when something we need or want involves a “free-access good.” We need coercion to solve these collective action problems. The best coercion is normatively legitimate coercion. Democratic theory, however, has focused more on preventing tyranny than on how to legitimate coercion. Finally, our discipline has neglected an important source of legitimate coercion: negotiation to agreement. Recognizing the central role of negotiation in politics would shed a different light on our relatively unexamined democratic commitments to transparency in process and contested elections. This analysis is overall both descriptive and aspirational, arguing that helping human beings to govern themselves has been in the DNA of our profession since its inception.

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Filed under: Academia, Sortition, Theory | Tagged: , , , , | 9 Comments »