Compare Iranian Constitutional Drafts and Transition Plans

Legitimacy as an examinable and revisable process

Legitimacy is not a numerical score in this project. Four levels are kept distinct: the origin and production of a draft; the architecture of the text itself; participation and contestation in the review process; and the capacity of the text and process to respond and revise over time.

The questionnaire is itself part of that test: a draft can face public criticism, a response by its author or supporters can be recorded, and a revised version can be examined again under the same criteria.

From declaration to guarantee

Each question follows a power pathway: who has authority, under what conditions, who may control or contest it, and what guarantees implementation of the outcome. Counting words or merely finding an institution is therefore insufficient.

Seven question groups

All 174 questions are organized into seven public groups: founding and legitimacy; distribution of power and governing capacity; restraint of power and rights guarantees; participation, contestation and political competition; pluralism, self-government and territorial order; resources, political economy and interdependence; and crisis, transition and systemic sustainability. These groups replace technical IDs in public presentation and do not produce scores.

External coverage reference

The questionnaire has also been cross-walked against the CCP-FACET topic ontology of the Comparative Constitutions Project as an external coverage check. The ontology is used to identify topics and possible blind spots; this project’s analysis still follows power, control, guarantee and sustainability.

Technical taxonomy used: CCP-FACET ontology

This project compares different Iranian constitutional drafts, not to rank them or decide which text is “better,” but to clarify the architecture of power in each.

We ask each draft the same questions about comparable situations. When a decision affects a person’s or a group’s rights, who makes it, what limits apply, and how can those affected challenge it or seek a remedy? We read the relevant provisions together rather than stopping at the name of a right or institution.

Capacity, control and revision over time

After identifying a mechanism, we examine the tools available to perform its function and who can control their use. These are distinct questions: an institution may be able to make effective decisions while access to challenge is restricted, or challenge may be accessible while the reviewing body cannot produce a binding result.

Capacity

Does the text provide a competent body, jurisdiction, access to information, resources and an enforcement route? A textual assessment cannot establish how a future institution will perform in practice.

Control

Who can help shape authority, scrutinize its exercise, demand reasons and secure correction? Who controls the reviewer’s appointment, removal, resources, jurisdiction and enforcement?

Sustainability

When demands change or disagreement persists, what routes exist for reconsidering the rules? What preserves lawful revision while preventing incumbents from rewriting the rules unilaterally for their own benefit?

Demands to change a territory’s political status are examined in the same way in federal and non-federal drafts. Peaceful advocacy, formal initiation, demonstrated support, negotiations and the final legal effect are separate stages. Concurrent or successive demands also raise questions about shared obligations, resources, environmental systems and the people who remain. These are inquiries into the text’s arrangements, not predictions about a population’s demands or a government’s survival.

The same standard for every text

Each question records both the route a text provides and its limits. Where a citizen initiative exists, we examine its threshold, legal effect and the reviewing institution’s discretion. Where another text provides no comparable direct route, its alternatives and citizens’ dependence on representative institutions must be visible in the same row. No arrangement is exempt from scrutiny.

Equal treatment does not require equal numbers of faults. The absence of a quota, referendum or political override of a judgment is not automatically a deficiency; it may reflect a different institutional choice or a restraint on power. Delegation to ordinary law is distinguished from silence and ambiguity. When a parent mechanism is not provided, its dependent subquestions are not counted as several independent defects.

The “Answers side by side” view places each text’s answer and references against the common question. “Shared topics for review” states the common criterion and revision question once, alongside the selected texts’ answers. Revision questions are proposals for discussion, not existing constitutional rules or established defects.

Evidence and limits of the reading

Each answer distinguishes express wording, a reading across provisions, delegated detail and a matter not identified within the reading scope. An unanswered research question must not be presented as constitutional silence. A reference to one related provision does not by itself establish that a rule is absent throughout the document.

This method is informed by concern for rights guarantees and public control of power; its questions are not assumption-free. A defensible comparison makes that basis visible, applies the same criteria to every text, preserves the evidence and remains open to correction. Its purpose is to make disagreements about constitutional proposals more precise and allow readers to judge their consequences from the answers and sources.

Document type and political phase

A permanent constitutional draft and a transition plan have different scopes. Each source identifies its document type and the phase assessed. Transitional powers and controls face the same shared criteria; a decision expressly reserved for a future constituent assembly is not read as a final constitutional rule. Section and page references replace article numbers where a document has no numbered constitutional articles.