Conservatism and Principlism in Contemporary Iran

In this paper, we seek to survey the relationship between principlism and conservatism in contemporary Iran. We use four hypotheses to demonstrate this relationship. In doing so, we classified conservatism into three dimensions, namely, economic, cultural and psychological conservatism and then survey its relationship with principlism. Our method research is a secondary analysis of data stemming from the fifth waves of the World Value Survey (WVS). Firstly, our analysis shows a significant positive correlation between the cultural dimension of conservatism or traditionalism and fundamentalism. Secondly, there is almost no relationship between two indices of psychological conservatism, namely, rule-following and need for security with the tendency to principlism. On the other hand, there is a significant negative and low correlation between economic conservatism and tendency to principlism so that even cause a small increase toward reformist. Thirdly, and regard to these findings, conservatism rather than shape only the political attitude of principlist, its separate elements disperse between principlist and reformist in Iran. Fourthly, this dispersion has led to conservatism fails to work in coherent, uniform and complex ideology and shape a conservative party in contemporary Iran.