ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how traditional attitudes, beliefs and cultural values, relate to the functioning of the system based on field research and discourse analysis. It explains the authoritarian functioning of the system, and then shows its relationship with cultural variables. The chapter refers to some of the important characteristics of authoritarianism, and discusses its connection with traditional culture. The Islamic Republic government follows the Shi'a tradition, which has an important basis in Iranian culture, and gets its legitimacy from this tradition. The thought of Seyyed Jamal al-Din Afghani and his followers including their reaction against Western culture, gradually became the paradigm and prevailed in political discourse. Imperial political culture took its legitimacy base from the two thousand five hundred years of Iranian Imperial history. One of the alternative tendencies was the national-liberal tendency, which was rooted in the Constitutional Revolution and reacted against the tendency supporting imperial culture. In the 1997 presidential election, Iranians supported democratic orientation.
