ABSTRACT
In an effort to simplify and make usable the complex information pertaining to the Russian-Iranian political dyad developed in Chapter 2, I construct a quantitative, multidimensional indicator of General Political Association (GPA) which measures annual changes in the overall quality of bilateral political relations between 1966 and 2013. As this study has argued, there is a consistent tendency in academic and non-academic traditions to treat changes in Russian-Iranian relations as a function of changing security conditions as well as a product of ongoing developments in the domestic politics of each individual nation, yet there has been little or no effort to empirically evaluate these claims or to determine the relative influence such factors and forces may have on the bilateral relationship.
