On Sat, 27 Jun 2009, Michael Smith wrote:
> The short, broad-brush response would that all these statistical
> arguments depend on a number of assumptions. They key one for the
> Chatham House (CH) tract is that large numbers of people in many
> different places couldn't possibly have changed their minds this much in
> the course of four years. Then there's all this smoke and mirrors about
> aggregate "conservative" and "reformist" votes -- which assumes that
> Iranians map the political space the same way we do, a very large
> assumption indeed.
They assume no such thing, and there's nothing unclear about these distinctions. The labels were derived directly from the 2005 voting tallies in the tables appended. "Conservatives" are people who voted for Rafsanjani when they were given a choice between him and Ahmadinejad (and this vote was in large part the same choice again). "Reformists" are people who voted for the reform candidates, who all had programmes that were the same or to the left of ex-President Khatami, and who define themselves as pretty much opposite of Ahmadinejad voters, who return the favor. Non-voters are people who didn't vote then.
There is nothing contrived or unclear about this distinctions, nor how they rank in a probability order. If anything Chatham house is being extremely conservative and charitable to rank the non-voters as more probable converts than the conservatives simply because less is known about them. The most plausible inferences from the 2000 election IMHO would rank them to the to the left of Rafsanjani if not to the left of both groups.
Michael