The Impact of Maurice Duverger’s Translated Works on Iran’s Constitutional Theory

Maurice Duverger was a French political scientist and professor of constitutional law in the 1950s-1970s, and greatly influenced the intellectual climate of constitutional law and political science. His fame spread abroad throughout Europe, North America and Asia, and his books and articles became known to thinkers and students in a score of countries as diverse as Iran, the U.S., and Spain. Duverghe stood between these two academic disciplines and tried to establish a link between them. Abolfazl Qazi, a constitutional law professor at the University of Tehran undertook the task of translating some of Duverger’s books into Persian, e.g., Institutions politiques et Droit constitutionnel (Constitutional Rights and Political Institutions), and Sociologie politique (Political Sociology). He also wrote a book which was clearly and significantly influenced by the French scholar’s writings on the subject of constitutional law. Nowadays, research conducted on the history of French constitutional thought have been analyzing the negative impact of Duverger’ school of thought. The important narrative that he presented about political institutions, for example, his discussions of ‘semi-authoritarian system’ and ‘semi-parliamentarism’ has been gradually forgotten. At the end of the 1970s, a slow but significant change in political science was taking place as the result of the systematic and comprehensive use of methods and theories of sociology and history by political scientists, and the growing value of collaborative research, empirical analyses and multidisciplinary scholarly efforts to discuss and analyze issues. This change turned Maurice Duverge into a historical figure who belonged to an obsolete and pre-scientific period. This "new" political science was not exclusively interested in the same issues that were of concern for Duverge such as voting. behavior and political parties. Instead, the attention somehow turned to exploring how politics can draw inspiration from other disciplines and encourage collaboration, elaboration, and evaluation.The results of the recent studies which have critically examined Duverger’s writings might also apply to the discussions of Iranian Constitutional theory. The main objective of this article is to find suitable answers to the following research questions: a) How have Duverger's works influenced Iran’s theory of constitutional rights? and b) What consequences have these works had on research concerning constitutional rights in Iran? Using the qualitative content analysis method, the most significant works of Duverger and Abolfazl Ghazi are examined in order to answer these questions. In the research hypothesis, the author claims that Ghazi’s translations of Duverger’s books have had a negative impact on the studies of constitutional law in Iran. The main findings indicate that the studies of constitutional rights in Iran are still under the influence of Abolfazl Ghazi’s work which had been in part influenced by Maurice Duverger's thought. These studies have been diverted from the right course and have not found its way. Thus, Iranian scholars and leading experts must pay closer attention to the link between constitutional rights and political science as two imperative fields of knowledge.