The approach of Iran’s presidential election brings to mind a managerial strategy routinely employed in the West known as “buy-in.”
All members of organizations of any size know how buy-in works. After deciding what is to happen, bosses consult their underlings, who gratefully deliver their thoughts. The bosses then implement their original decisions, confident that the underlings, thinking they’ve exerted real influence at high levels, will execute them with diminished need for persuasion.
For 50 million Iranians eligible to vote on June 14, democracy seems—from the outside—to be a massive buy-in scheme.
Although voting will make them feel as though they’ve exerted influence over the Islamic Republic’s affairs, much about the outcome already has been decided.
In Iran, all important decisions come from the unelected supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Voters elect a president, whose enumerated powers are limited, from among a group of candidates Khamenei controls.
Of 686 Iranians who registered to run for president in the imminent election, eight received approval from the 12-member Guardians Council.
All candidates on the short list support the supreme leader and his conservative theocracy.
Khamenei wants no repeat of the 2009 election, which kept firebrand Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in office and filled streets with Iranians angry about election-rigging.
Because Ahmadinejad has fallen from favor, the successor he prefers didn’t make the Guardian Council cut. Neither did former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, whom the ruling clergy apparently found too inclined toward reform but whose impressive tenure in Iranian power circles hardly bespeaks liberality.
Also excluded were all 30 of the women who registered to run.
So Khamenei will have an ally as president. That president will be male. And little about Iranian governance—or life—will change.
Because important decisions that might have been subject to vote already have been made, the reason Iran troubles itself with an election falls subject to question.
Yet the answer is clear enough. The boss wants buy-in. What the boss wants, the boss gets.
(Online May 31, 2013; author’s e-mail: [email protected].)