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Abstract
Recent surveys substantiate that Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi is a prominent opposition figure among Iranians who oppose the Islamic Republic of Iran. However, research indicates that direct questioning in authoritarian states may misconstrue the support for anti-regime figures. This paper estimates Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi’s true level of support among Iranians who (a) oppose the Islamic Republic AND (b) actively name a preferred political leader — the politically engaged, preference-holding segment most relevant to democratic transition scenarios. We deploy Margaret E. Roberts’ Fear-Friction-Flooding censorship framework, Bayesian preference falsification correction, digital revealed preference analysis, and protest-calibrated estimation to data from the GAMAAN survey of 77,216 respondents and the January 2026 nationwide protests. We find that Pahlavi commands 59.0% of raw support among anti-Islamic Republic Iranians who named a political figure, rising to a corrected 77.0% after accounting for censorship-driven preference falsification, temporal growth, and revealed preferences from protest participation.
