The history of the Islamic Republic of Iran—established in 1979 following the revolution that overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi—is marked by a dense sequence of developments that have progressively altered its political and institutional configuration. These changes, however, have only sporadically been recognized by Western analyses, which have instead tended to perpetuate a more functional and instrumental stereotype based on the image of a monolithic, highly verticalized religious autocracy. While such a characterization was broadly accurate during the first decade of the Islamic Republic, it has undergone a profound transformation since 1989.