RESEARCH LETTER OF POLITICAL SCIENSE
Year:2008 | Volume:3 | Issue:4 (12)|Papers Count:7

The present paper attempts to analyze the formation of a charismatic leader and the social context which he/she establishes. The main features of the charismatic leader and the role of "crisis" in the rise of such a leader will be discussed in detail. After a theoretical review over the subject matter, the paper will move forward to apply the theories on the case of Khatami in Iran (1997-2005). Secondary analyses of the available survey results have been the main method used to show "how" and "why" Khatami cultivated a charismatic image which gradually declined until 2005 and is now increasing again in the eyes of Iranians.

This article tends to analyze rent seeking in Iran government budgeting. It aims at developing an analytical framework to help us increase our understanding of rent seeking in public budgeting. In fact the paper focuses on political economy aspect of rent seeking, and particularly on rent seeking in government budgeting. The first section discusses rent seeking in government budgeting based on the public choice theory. The next section considers the interaction between politicians and voters. The discussion will proceed by exploring and analyzing four interaction models between politicians and voters: Fiscal persuasion, fiscal exchange, fiscal compulsion and fiscal abstention. The last section presents the ways in which government budgetary actors and agents (i.e. voters, politicians, bureaucrats and pressure groups) take certain shares of the budget public resources. Furthermore, there is an analysis of the mechanism and processes that facilitate rent seeking in public budgeting.

All constitutions are the results, of social situations of the time when the law has been formulated and inevitably they cannot be indifferent to any of their contemporary issues arid events. With the advent of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the revolutionary society was in need of a formulated and written text: the Constitution. With the triumph of the Islamic Revolution of Iran, the need for a new Constitution was emerged. The responsibility of drafting of constitution was given to the Assembly of Constitution Experts for finalizing the constitution of Islamic Republic of Iran. The author in this article with totally reference to the debates of the Assembly of Constitution Experts and analyzing the debates, will try to answer the main question: what is the main attitude of Experts of constituent assembly of the constitution of Islamic Republic of Iran about the issue of ethnicity? In this paper, the author, has elected the 33 members of Assembly of Experts and investigated their attituds about the ethnicity.In order to study the concept of ethnicity in contemporary Iran, it seems necessary to understand the attitude of the members of this Assembly toward the issue of ethnicity in their discussions. My assumption in this paper is that these experts had a five-angle attitude (religious, obvious, rational, revolutionary, and jurisprudential) to the issue of ethnicity and regarded them as insignificant subject of universality of Islam. In this article, the writer, has selected and studied the 36 articles of the constitution of Islamic Republic of Iran.

The encounter of Iranians with the invigorating process of globalization has entangled Iranians in the fierce struggle for rival models for development: affirmative idealism in favor of pluralist democracy, assertive bureaucratic authoritarianism and the utopian romanticism/and or militant extremism. The first reflects the cultural civility in approach, the second an exit strategy from the adverse impacts of globalization and the last two demonstrate entanglement in the instinctive reaction. Ironically, this entanglement has long involved Iranians in the Sorrel dialectic. Due to the diversity in values (defined in terms of Iran's cultural civilization in contrast to the Western civic culture dominant over the process of globalization), Iranians have ended up with the inadvertent outcomes they had originally planned to avoid. Frustration with the hope for democratic pluralism has convinced most patriotic elites of the Constitutional Revolution and the religious elites of the 1953 to opt respectively for military and then bureaucratic authoritarianism of the Pahlavi dynasty. Similarly the bureaucratic authoritarianism of the 2nd Pahlavi monarch has been able to enfeeble the forces in favor of pluralist democracy but succumbed to the primary zeal for utopian romanticism and militant extremism he was eventually fighting against.In his bid to present an exit strategy from this Sorrel "dialectic" to a sustainable discourse of "dialogue" for pluralist democracy, it is argued that Iran needs a renaissance of its own. This renaissance can be defined in terms of first a conceptual model of "protocol identity." Based upon such self attempt to define the self at both individual and institutional leves, Iranians across the right-left/and cultural-structural spectrum can work out their own transformational strategies for democracy, defined in terms of an integrative pluralism. Inspired by Iranian moral pragmatism, this transformational strategy can best be devised, administered and implemented in terms of Iranian theory of "Shrewd Deconstructivism /bon fekani rendaneh." In this respect, various mechanisms for accommodating pluralist democracy are also discussed.

Formation of students political trust in the government is affected by various individual and social factors. The purpose of the present article is to study the factors influencing students political trust and how factors such as piety, universalism, participating in governmental institutions, material and spiritual values, the rate of use of media and religiosity affect it. Students political trust in the government has been assessed by indices such as trust in political actors, political institutions and political systems. Results indicated that 37% of students have political trust in the government. Further, results showed that religiosity, material values and use of foreign Media played a significant role in students political trust in the government.

Social capital is among the society-based theories that are a serious focus for social thought in the contemporary era. However, the multidimensional links of this concept with economic, political, cultural and social issues have in practice made its recognition and explanation difficult so that determining its use and limits and giving it a standard general definition is quite hard. So producing social capital and providing the prerequisites of developing civil society and democracy depend on a precise recognition of these concepts and their relation and interaction. This article has focused on structural dimension of social capital and considered voluntary associations and organizations as a focal knot for growth and reinforcement of social capital, civil society and democracy.

The Pahlavi royal dynasty was established in Iran by military coup-d' etat, Reza Shah, its founding father, and his son Mohammad Reza Shah, reorganized and reinforced the army to protect their throne. This army had a vital role in the establishment and protection of Pahlavi dynasty. But, after the debut of Islamic Revolution, the royal army failed to defend the Pahlavi dynasty's dominance and to prevent its collapse. This article seeks to answer why did the Iranian royal army fail to protect the Pahlavi kingdom? The article proposes that the answer lies in some structural factors/features of the Iranian royal army which made it too weak to defend the Pahlavi dynasty. These structural factors/features will be introduced and their effects on the royal army behavior in confronting of Islamic Revolution will be analyzed.