The scholarly article by Tereza Jermanová, “Beyond Coordination: The Authoritarian Constitution at the Centre of Intra-Regime Conflict in Post-1979 Iran”, presented earlier this year at the Political Studies Association (PSA) conference in the UK, has been awarded the 2025 PSA Autocracy and Regime Change Specialist Group Best Paper Award.

The expert jury members, Dr. Anne Wolf and Dr. Ka Ming Chan, reviewed the paper as follows:

“The paper “Beyond Coordination: The Authoritarian Constitution at the Centre of Intra-Regime Conflict in Post-1979 Iran” by Tereza Jermanová focuses on the roles of constitutions in authoritarian regimes. This paper highlights that constitutions can be a space of intense political conflicts among authoritarian elites. Specifically, it argues that authoritarian elites can leverage the ambiguities embedded in constitutions to advance their agenda and power, which is an unintended consequence of authoritarian constitution-building. Theoretically, the paper challenges the conventional functionalist assumption according to which authoritarian constitutions mainly serve to perpetuate autocratic rule. Empirically, the paper provides an outstanding analysis of how Iranian presidents use the constitution to counteract the dominance of clerical institutions. This paper makes a novel contribution to research on authoritarian institutions, constitutional studies, and elites’ behaviour.“