The impression you get listening to US politicians talk about Iran is that Iranians overwhelmingly oppose the regime. Mike Waltz says, “The people of Iran want freedom.” Ted Cruz says, “the people of Iran want to stand with America” and “they want to stand with freedom.” Newt Gingrich says, “the overwhelming majority of Iranians want freedom and would reject the regime in a fair election.” Is this really true?
One source of evidence is the waves of protests that have racked the country, including the latest wave in which more than 2,000 people may have died. Drawing inferences about public opinion from protests is common, yet it is fraught with difficulty.
Whenever there’s a large protest movement in Britain or the US, supporters of the movement will claim the protests show that “the people” want whatever it is that they want. But this is often not the case. For example, the largest ever single-day protest in the US was the “No Kings” rally on 18 October, when several million Americans took to the streets. Does this show that Americans overwhelmingly oppose Trump? No. It merely shows that some liberals and Democrats strongly oppose him.
Likewise, there were numerous anti-lockdown protests in Britain during the pandemic, despite lockdown being extremely popular with the public. In this case, protests were an inverse indicator of the majority’s preference. So while protests in Iran obviously reflect some level of opposition to the regime, they do not prove that such opposition is overwhelming.
Another source of evidence that Iranians overwhelmingly oppose the regime is polling by the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN). The Tony Blair Institute cites a GAMAAN poll from 2022 in which a large majority of respondents described themselves as “proponents of regime change”.
However, GAMAAN’s methodology is highly questionable and has been criticized by other Iranian scholars and the respected pollster Pew Research. Rather than using traditional probability sampling, GAMAAN distributes its surveys via social media and Psiphon VPN (software designed to circumvent Internet censorship). As a result, its samples are unlikely to be representative of the Iranian population, with dissidents being heavily oversampled.
By way of illustration, GAMAAN reported in a 2020 survey that fully one third of Iranians were “atheists”, “humanists” or people with “no religion”. Yet when Iran took part in the World Values Survey that same year, only 4% of respondents said that religion was “not at all important” in their lives. According to official census data, 99% of Iranians are Muslim.
What’s more, evidence from other research organizations paints a much more nuanced picture of public opinion in Iran.
In the 2020 wave of the World Values Survey, about half of Iranians said they had “quite a lot” or “a great deal” of confidence in their national government, which was actually higher than the corresponding percentage in some Western countries. Gallup obtained an almost identical figure in 2022. And in a 2024 survey, they found that Iranians approve more of Chinese and Russian leaders than of US leaders.
Likewise, the Center for International Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM) asked Iranians in 2024 whether “the Islamic Republic should be replaced with another form of government” and found that 80% disagreed.
They posed a related question — whether Iran’s system of government will change — using a list experiment. This is a technique for eliciting people’s true beliefs under conditions where they might be inclined to conceal them (such as in a country like Iran). However, the percentage who indicated the system of government would change was only slightly higher in the list experiment, suggesting low levels of belief falsification.
The CISSM also asked Iranians, “If you could change one thing about Iran, what would it be?” By far the most common answer was “more economically prosperous”, whereas only 9% of respondents said “more democratic and free”. Indeed, dissatisfaction with the economy appears to be widespread.
All these findings should be interpreted with caution. Even list experiments cannot get around the problem of dissidents being less inclined to participate in surveys. Though the CISSM has done extensive quality control. Their estimate of BBC Persian viewership closely matches figures published by BBC Persian itself. And their pollster, IranPoll, was able to predict the 2017 Iranian election result to within two percentage points.
The evidence that Iranians overwhelmingly oppose the regime is weak. In fact, the claims made by Waltz, Cruz and Gingrich are probably wrong.
Noah Carl is Editor at Aporia Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @NoahCarl90.
