AP® Comparative Government and Politics · Unit 2 · Topic 2.7
Iran's Guardian Council and Expediency Council
The Guardian Council is an unelected twelve-member body that screens every candidate before elections and can strike down any Majles bill it judges un-Islamic or unconstitutional, while the Expediency Council settles the resulting standoffs.
Iran holds real elections with real campaigning, but the field is set before voters arrive. The Guardian Council reviews every registered candidate for the Majles, the presidency, and the Assembly of Experts, and disqualifies anyone it decides is insufficiently loyal to the Islamic Republic or insufficiently Islamic in practice. Thousands of hopefuls, including sitting legislators, get struck from the list before ballots are printed. Voters then choose freely among whoever survives the cut, so the election itself looks competitive even though the real decision happened earlier, behind closed doors.
The Council does the same filtering to legislation. Any bill the Majles passes goes to the Guardian Council, which checks it against the constitution and against Islamic law. If the Council objects, the bill bounces back to the Majles for revision. When the two sides cannot agree, the dispute goes to the Expediency Council, a separate body created to issue a final, binding ruling and keep the system from freezing in permanent deadlock. The Majles can write policy, but it cannot make policy alone.
This pairs directly with the composition question: six of the twelve Guardian Council members are clerics appointed directly by the Supreme Leader, and six are jurists nominated by the judiciary chief (himself a Supreme Leader appointee) and confirmed by the Majles. That chain means the body policing elected institutions answers, in practice, to the unelected Supreme Leader, which is the throughline for comparing Iran's branches against the more clearly separated systems elsewhere in the course.
Key terms
- Guardian Council
- A twelve-member unelected body that vets candidates for office and reviews Majles legislation for compliance with the constitution and Islamic law.
- Expediency Council
- A body that issues final, binding rulings when the Majles and Guardian Council cannot resolve a dispute over legislation.
- Majles
- Iran's elected national legislature, whose bills do not become law until they clear the Guardian Council.
- vetting
- The Guardian Council's pre-election screening process that disqualifies candidates before ballots are printed.
Watch it explained
- How it worksWalk me through how the twelve-member Guardian Council vets a candidate for the Majles.
- Worked exampleShow me a bill from the Majles being struck down by the Guardian Council and sent to the Expediency Council.
- How it worksHow do the six clerics and six jurists on the Guardian Council get their seats?
- Going furtherWhat happens to electoral competition when a single unelected body controls who may run?
Check yourself
End of topic.