'Ideological,' 'not scientific': Iran polling firm GAMAAN flawed, not independent

GAMAAN has extensive ties to U.S. government-funded, pro-regime change orgs, and employs unreliable survey methods that produce misleading results

Iranians gather in Berlin in October 2022 to protest the Islamic Republic — Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN), an influential Dutch polling firm that employs unorthodox survey methods to “extract the (real) opinions of Iranians about (sensitive) social and political topics,” routinely calls itself an “independent” research foundation. News outlets and researchers citing GAMAAN have echoed this refrain when discussing the organization’s headline-grabbing findings, which portray the Iranian citizenry as far more secular and regime-critical compared to other polling research. GAMAAN asserts that its survey results can be generalized to the entire population of “literate individuals over the age of 19 residing in Iran.”

However, an investigation by Noir News reveals extensive ties between GAMAAN and U.S. government-funded organizations, many of which openly advocate for regime change in Iran, casting doubt on the polling group’s stated independence. Further, GAMAAN’s findings are not applicable to the entire Iranian populace due to biased survey methods that lead to an unrepresentative sample, according to multiple polling experts.

“[T]hey know what they think, and they want to use the language of social science to demonstrate that those claims are actually truth. And of course, that’s a problem,” said Daniel Tavana, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Penn State who was a Principal Investigator for Princeton’s Iran Social Survey.

“[T]hey’re just ideological,” Tavana said. “They are very opposed to the regime, want to embarrass the regime in whatever way they can, and are happy to say… whatever they think will most effectively do that in any given point of time, regardless of whether or not they have evidence for it.”

While Iranian state-owned media has discussed some of GAMAAN’s ties to Western-funded organizations and regime change proponents, and the limitations of its survey methods, Noir is the first to report the full scope of GAMAAN’s numerous connections with U.S. government-funded regime change operatives, and the severity of its methodological issues.

Given GAMAAN’s rapid rise to prominence, with its findings often cited by Western governments and prestigious news outlets, the group’s numerous ties to U.S. government-funded supporters of regime change in Iran, and the organization’s dubious survey methods, warrant scrutiny, especially given the anti-Islamic Republic bent of its survey results (with one survey finding 81% of respondents opposed the Islamic Republic), which are used by critics as a cudgel against Iran’s government. GAMAAN founders Pooyan Tamimi Arab, an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University, and Ammar Maleki, an Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at Tilburg University, who could not be reached for comment, are themselves outspoken critics of the Iranian regime. Maleki refers to himself as a “pro-democracy activist,” and is a vociferous critic of the Islamic Republic and proponent of regime change.

Indeed, GAMAAN has relied on U.S. government-funded VPN and anti-censorship software providers like Psiphon to disseminate its surveys; collaborated with the USAID-funded, pro-regime change Tony Blair Institute; and collaborated with and received funding from historian Ladan Boroumand, co-founder of the Iranian regime-critical Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran, which is in turn supported by the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Likewise, for a February 2023 report on Iranians’ attitudes towards the anti-regime street protests, GAMAAN enlisted the help of U.S. government-linked Iran International and U.S. government-funded Voice of America Persian in circulating survey questions.

Founded in 2019, the logic behind GAMAAN’s founding was that, in the context of state repression, traditional survey approaches based on random sampling and in-person or telephone interviews fail to capture the population’s true beliefs regarding sensitive religious and political topics, because “individuals often censor their true views or even actively alter them to avoid scrutiny by authorities,” per GAMAAN. Instead, the group distributes its surveys via social media, VPN platforms like Psiphon, and encrypted messaging platforms like Telegram, with respondents able to participate anonymously.

Unlike traditional polling based on probability sampling – random selection of respondents from the target population, and persistent follow-up with those selected to minimize non-responsiveness – participation in GAMAAN’s surveys is voluntary (respondents “opt-in”), and respondents are not randomly selected from the broader target population (literate Iranians over the age of 19). Instead, respondents are reached “through random sampling via the popular Internet censorship circumvention provider Psiphon VPN, as well as ensuing sharing by respondents on social networks (Telegram, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Twitter).” Prior to its use of VPN platforms like Psiphon for sampling, GAMAAN exclusively relied on its surveys being shared on social media, or “multiple chain-referral sampling,” also referred to as “snowball sampling.”

To account for methodological issues with non-random sampling inherent to opt-in surveys, GAMAAN tries to circulate its polls across a range of channels “representing radically diverse social layers of society and political perspectives,” and adjusts response data using statistical methods meant to render the final polling data more representative of the target population (literate Iranians 19 years and older with Internet access). Circulation of the group’s surveys has at times been aided by social media virality.

Using this unorthodox methodology, GAMAAN’s survey results have often surprised observers and contradicted the findings of long-established pollsters like Pew Research and Gallup, which employ conventional face-to-face and telephone polling methods. The group’s 2020 survey on Iranians’ religious beliefs made waves for its findings showing less religiosity among the Iranian population than was generally believed (and indicated in prior polling). Among other surprising results, GAMAAN’s survey found 22% of respondents did not belong to any religion, 9% identified as atheist, and 47% reported “having transitioned from being religious to non-religious.” In contrast, Pew Research has reported that 99.4% of Iranians are Muslim (though this finding is from a decade earlier).

But according to polling experts, GAMAAN’s findings cannot be generalized to the broader Iranian public due to significant bias in who its surveys reach. GAMAAN relies chiefly on the Psiphon VPN platform to circulate its survey questionnaires, with about 66% of respondents in its latest poll participating through the platform, and the remainder reached through Telegram (13.1%), Instagram (8.5%), WhatsApp (4.6%), Twitter/X (1.5%), and the remaining 6.7% through other undisclosed channels. According to polling experts, these methods suffer from “coverage bias” in that they fail to reach large swathes of the Iranian population, including Iranians who do not use the internet, or do not use VPNs or encrypted messaging.

Figure 10 — Maleki, Ammar. 2024. Iranians’ Attitudes Toward the 2024 Snap Presidential Election. Published online, gamaan.org: GAMAAN.

Nor do GAMAAN’s methods account for the fact that Iranians who use Psiphon or come across its surveys through social media are different in important ways from the Iranian population as a whole, to which GAMAAN claims its findings can be generalized. Indeed, GAMAAN’s survey links are frequently shared by vocal critics of the Iranian regime, and demographic data reported by GAMAAN shows respondents are disproportionately urban (93.6% of respondents in its latest survey, vs. about 80% of the total Iranian population), college-educated (70.9% of respondents, compared to 27.7% of literate Iranians 19 years and older, per labor force statistics cited by GAMAAN); and high-income (54% of respondents had a “household monthly income above 13 million Rials,” compared to 40% among the target population, per GAMAAN’s methodology section).

“[F]or that inference that GAMAAN is making to be true, that this sample represents the Iranian population, the adult age population, we would have to assume or believe that Psiphon users are reflective of the Iranian population as a whole, which… just could not possibly be true,” Tavana said.

GAMAAN’s surveys have a high rate of repeat participation (i.e., a large share of respondents to a given survey participated in previous GAMAAN polling), with 26% of respondents in its most recent poll having participated in previous GAMAAN surveys, which GAMAAN interpreted as “indicating that the random sampling method was effective in distributing the questionnaire among a wide range of demographic groups, reaching far beyond networks familiar with GAMAAN.”

“The authors’ claim that this number provides evidence that their methods reach a random sample is a vast misinterpretation,” according to Kevan Harris, an Associate Professor of Sociology at UCLA who was a Principal Investigator for the Iran Social Survey along with Tavana. “Indeed it is the opposite. This number, if true, is evidence of how this organization’s methods are reaching a relatively small, interconnected group of people who are predisposed to take their surveys.”

Harris highlighted that, per GAMAAN’s own methodology section in its most recent survey report, 5-11 million Iranians use Psiphon daily (the main source of survey participants), meaning the “refined sample” of 77,216 (which excludes “random or bot-entered responses,” per GAMAAN) constitutes approximately 0.7-1.5% of daily Psiphon users in Iran, yet GAMAAN reported that “26% of respondents had previously participated in GAMAAN’s surveys.”

“When you have a 26% repeat rate from what’s already less than 2% of your potential sample pool of Psiphon users (and less than 0.2% of all adult VPN users), that’s a major red flag about how representative your sample really is,” Harris wrote in an email to Noir. “[I]t shows they’re not really getting a random sample of all Iranians, just likely a small, enthusiastic subset who regularly take their surveys. Indeed, the 26% number, given this relatively large sample size, is telling.”

Sunghee Lee, an Associate Research Professor at the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center, wrote in an email to Noir that “without further information,” she would agree with Harris’ assessment of the problematic nature of the high repeat-response rate. “Based on my quick search, the adult population of Iran appears to be around 70 million. The sample of 77K from the 2024 June report accounts for 0.1% of the adult population. This means that, if a true probability sample is used for 77K, you are likely to be sampled 1 out of 1000 studies. The fact that 26% of the sample is a repeat group suggests that the sample is likely to represent a group much narrower in scope than the adult population.”

While GAMAAN purports to use “various balancing methods such as weighting and the sample matching method” to derive a representative sample from its raw survey data, survey experts interviewed by Noir said these methods can’t make up for the unrepresentative nature of GAMAAN’s underlying data.

“[W]e use weights when we don’t know what the probability is that any given person will enter into a sample, and so we weight certain respondents in our sample more or less if we think that they were more or less likely to be chosen to be on our sample, we don’t have any way to assess that,” Tavana said. “So what they call weights is actually just refining the sample so that on key demographics, the sample looks more like the Iranian [population]. But it’s not a probability sample to begin with[.]”

Stanford University social psychologist and survey methodologist Jon Krosnick concurred, writing in an email to Noir: “[T]he phrase ‘matching and weighting’ without disclosing the details also sounds like a snake oil salesman. There have been lots of claims that ‘matching and weighting’ have improved the accuracy of non-probability samples, but lots of published papers have shown that such methods failed rather than succeeding. I don’t know of a single one showing improvement in accuracy.”

Lee likewise expressed doubt that GAMAAN’s weighting and sample matching adjustments can yield a representative sample: “I am not entirely convinced that for a population with less than 30% with college education can be examined by a sample with more than 70% with college education even after the weighting is applied.”

Lee also noted that the Pew Research study GAMAAN links to in its June 2024 survey report when discussing the “raking” weighting method for adjusting online opt-in samples, which used over 30,000 online opt-in survey responses to evaluate weighting procedures and their ability to reduce bias, concluded that “[e]ven the most effective adjustment procedures were unable to remove most of the bias.”

Lee also highlighted that GAMAAN’s “sample is representative only on the dimensions that the study attempted to balance on. They are five demographic variables used in raking: age group, gender, level of education, residential area (urban or rural), and provincial population. Therefore, whether results on the study outcome variables (e.g., expected election turnout) are representative is debatable.”

“The bottom line for me is that abandoning random sampling in Iran or the U.S. leaves a researcher with no basis for generalizing the results of a survey to any population,” Krosnick wrote. “It’s fine to talk about the obtained results as describing the people who participated. But not to generalize.”

According to the survey experts interviewed by Noir, a chief issue with GAMAAN’s approach is the inappropriate generalization of its survey results to the entire Iranian adult population, rather than the (likely meaningfully different) participants in its surveys.

“This doesn’t mean [GAMAAN’s] surveys are useless, but their results should be presented much more cautiously, with clear acknowledgment that they represent opinions of a specific, self-selected subset of internet-using, politically engaged people - not the general population,” Harris wrote in an email to Noir. “This is especially crucial when the surveys cover sensitive political topics that might influence US/European policy or public opinion.”

“I have no doubt in my mind that with the data GAMAAN has, we could make inferences to Psiphon users, and frankly, that would be fascinating to know what Psiphon users think and believe about the Iranian government,” Tavana said. “It’s an incredibly important constituency we could generalize their findings to, and make inferences about, the activist population, maybe even the online population, right? That would be fine, but to say that it’s representative of the whole country… we would have to believe [all] of these things that we know are false. We would have to believe that Psiphon users in particular, but also Twitter and Telegram users are reflective of their population, and we already have substantial verified information that they are not.”

“GAMAAN tells us to believe that their findings are generalizable to the entire adult population, right? This is invalid,” Tavana said. “That conclusion does not follow from, even if we had their data, even if we knew what procedures they were following, how they were recruiting subjects and so on, that scientifically does not logically follow from what they are doing.”

Even the central premise of GAMAAN’s approach, that citizens of a country with a repressive, authoritarian state will not give honest answers to questions pertaining to sensitive political or cultural issues when an interviewer is present, is dubious, Krosnick wrote.

“[M]any studies have surprisingly shown that removing interviewers rarely causes responses to change much,” Krosnick wrote. “In general, if a person is going to participate in answering questions, why bother if the person is going to lie – it’s obviously easier just to decline to participate at all from the start or to break off mid-interview.”

GAMAAN has also drawn criticism for a lack of transparency in its methods and – with one exception – a failure to subject its work to the rigor and scrutiny of publishing in peer-reviewed academic journals.

“Because they don’t document carefully enough for scientific standards what they do, none of what they produce is replicable,” Tavana said. “This is compounded by the fact that their data is not publicly available. I cannot go and download their data and analyze it for myself, right?”

The only article based on GAMAAN’s survey work that has been published in a peer-reviewed academic journal to date, “Survey Zoroastrians: Online Religious Identification in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” primarily focuses on a single finding from GAMAAN’s 2020 survey on Iranians’ religious beliefs (which was “financially supported by and carried out in cooperation with Dr. Ladan Boroumand” of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, an Iranian regime-critical organization supported by the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy) – that 8% of respondents identified as Zoroastrian (a far higher share than reported in previous research). The paper does not use GAMAAN’s more controversial findings (such as those concerning Iranians’ political beliefs). Moreover, a note appended to the journal article states “[t]he raw data used for this research can be shared with researchers under a confidentiality and collaborative agreement with GAMAAN,” which Tavana characterized as “unusual.”

“Typically, we do not require these kinds of agreements for access to this type of data,” Tavana wrote in an email to Noir. “I have seen it before when the data is proprietary, or owned by a private company. But not data an academic has collected on their own. This means that no one - not the reviewers, the editorial staff, or anyone else - has verified the claims made in the article.”

“[B]ecause we cannot replicate what they do, because their data are not available, we don’t know whether the inferences [] they are making on that data are valid, and so we have to take them at their word, and there are many reasons why we probably should not take them at their word,” Tavana said.

GAMAAN’s methodological shortcomings may account for substantial differences seen between its findings and those of long-established pollsters using traditional probability sampling. For instance, in a 2022 survey on Iranians’ political beliefs, GAMAAN reported far lower approval ratings for then-president Ebrahim Raisi compared to those reported by Gallup in a 2021 survey. GAMAAN itself highlighted this divergence (illustrated in the graphic below), but wrote that “both surveys are substantially similar… if Gallup’s results are compared with only the Principlists and Reformists in GAMAAN’s sample” (meaning, responses from more conservative and incrementalist participants in GAMAAN’s survey align with Gallup’s findings across its entire sample).

Figure 13-1 — Maleki, Ammar. 2022. Iranians’ Attitudes Toward Political Systems: A 2022 Survey Report. Published online, gamaan.org: GAMAAN.

GAMAAN’s ties to U.S. government-funded, pro-regime change orgs

Chief among GAMAAN’s ties to U.S. government-funded groups is the organization’s recent “partnership” with the Tony Blair Institute. GAMAAN “exclusively provided” the U.K. nonprofit with detailed survey data gathered in June 2020 (regarding Iranians’ religious beliefs), and February & December 2022 (regarding political systems and the Mahsa Amini street protests, respectively). The Tony Blair Institute used GAMAAN’s survey data for a series of articles depicting the Iranian populace as eager for regime change, with one article titled “The People of Iran Are Shouting for Regime Change - But Is the West Listening?”.

Founded by former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Institute has received millions in grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), at least some of which were Cooperative Agreement grants “characterized by extended involvement between recipient and agency.” The Tony Blair Institute is also funded by the U.K.’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (akin to America’s State Department), and private entities such as the French consulting firm Altai Consulting; Altai boasts the European Commission, USAID, and French Development Agency as clients.

GAMAAN’s widely-discussed 2020 survey of Iranians’ religious beliefs was “financially supported by and carried out in cooperation with” Dr. Ladan Boroumand, co-founder and research director of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, a nonprofit focused on Iranian human rights abuses and critical of Iran’s Islamist government. Named after her father Abdorrahman Boroumand, an Iranian lawyer and pro-democracy activist who was allegedly assassinated by Islamic Republic agents in 1991, the Center’s ‘Omid’ project documents cases of executions and assassinations in Iran in a searchable electronic database. The organization isn’t shy about supporting regime change, stating that its “goal is to prepare for a peaceful and democratic transition in Iran and build a more just future.”

The Boroumand Center has received substantial funding from the U.S. government-financed National Endowment for Democracy (NED), of which the Boroumand Center is a “partner.” Ladan Boroumand has held multiple positions at the NED, including as a former Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow researching “secularization in Iran,” a current member of the editorial board for the NED’s Journal of Democracy, and a current Research Council Member at the NED’s International Forum for Democratic Studies. She has also served on the Steering Committee of the World Movement for Democracy, of which the NED serves as the “secretariat.”

Ladan Boroumand is also on the advisory committee for the Atlantic Council’s Iran Strategy Project, which convened various experts and former officials “to develop a holistic US policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran for the next four years.” The Atlantic Council is an influential international relations think tank with extensive ties to U.S. lawmakers that receives large sums from the U.S. government (with FY 2023 grant obligations totaling over $6 million). The group’s October 2024 Iran Strategy Project report recommends a policy of continued pressure against the Islamic Republic, including through “enhanced support to the Iranian people” with the “long-term goal of supporting the Iranian people’s ability to change their system of government if they so desire.”

Ladan Boroumand was invited along with her sister Roya Boroumand to a July 2018 speech by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the Reagan Library, amid the Trump administration’s pivot to a hardline posture towards the Islamic Republic. The two sisters likewise joined 12 other Iranian diaspora women in signing an August 2019 open letter calling for a “transition from the Islamic Republic.”

GAMAAN has also consulted with Dr. Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize recipient who has long worked with the U.S. government and NED-funded Tavaana, a project of the E-Collaborative for Civic Education (ECCE) founded by staunch Islamic Republic opponents Mariam Memarsadeghi and Akbar Atri. Tavaana, which describes itself as “Iran’s premier civic education and civil society capacity building initiative” aimed at ushering in democratic governance, creates and disseminates regime-critical media and information on anti-censorship tools, and has an extensive social media following. Memarsadeghi was also a signatory to the August 2019 open letter calling for a “transition from the Islamic Republic.”

Memarsadeghi is also the founder and director of the Cyrus Forum, an organization that supports ousting the Islamic Republic and works to “reverse engineer an Iranian government that upholds security, the rule of law, and individual liberty.” Ladan Boroumand is one of only two advisors to the Cyrus Forum, and was previously listed on Tavaana’s website as a teacher.

Ebadi also appears to have been invited to the U.S. State Department’s 2017 Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) Implementers’ Conference, organized by the Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, Office of Assistance Coordination (NEA/AC). Ebadi’s name and role as President of The Centre for Supporters of Human Rights – a U.K. NGO Ebadi founded focused on human rights issues in Iran – appear on a guest list circulated by the State Department in September 2017.

GAMAAN has also relied on U.S. government-funded virtual private network (VPN) providers Psiphon and Lantern for assistance disseminating their surveys and bypassing Iranian government internet censorship. Since at least 2021, GAMAAN has collaborated with Psiphon, an open-source tool for circumventing internet censorship (using VPN and other technologies) that was developed at the University of Toronto and publicly-released in 2006. Psiphon has received millions in funding from the Open Technology Fund, which “receives the majority of its funding from the U.S. government via the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM).”

Psiphon, the Tony Blair Institute, and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center did not respond to requests for comment. Shirin Ebadi did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Context

GAMAAN co-founder Ammar Maleki’s ire against the Islamic Republic is more than ideological, it’s personal. His father, Mohammad Maleki, who served as the first president of the University of Tehran, was a well-known critic of the country’s human rights abuses and use of the death penalty. In 2019, the elder Maleki joined 13 other Iranian activists in signing a pair of open letters calling for Iran’s Supreme Leader to step down and a “complete and peaceful transition” away from the Islamic Republic. Ammar Maleki told Univers, the student newspaper of his employer, Tilburg University, “my father was imprisoned regularly until old age. Almost all the milestones in my life he missed.”

He makes his views on the Islamic Republic clear on X (formerly Twitter): “To understand/analyze the #Islamic_Republic of Iran, 3 golden rules should be kept in mind: 1- I.R. [Islamic Republic] cannot be reformed by dialogue but will surrender to pressure 2- I.R. officials lie unless proven otherwise 3- when I.R. officials/supporters say #Iran, they mean the I.R. only!”

Hardline politics are not unusual among academics. More unusual, and concerning, is Maleki’s willingness to accuse those who call into question GAMAAN’s findings and methodology of carrying water for the Islamic Republic. Daniel Tavana experienced this firsthand when he criticized GAMAAN’s methodology online.

“I understand that you have a hard time these days selling your data by IRGC-initiated IranPoll, so you attack GAMAAN to take attention. I cannot waste my time answering nonsense on GAMAAN’s method for an apologist! Our results were corroborated by external checks & field evidence,” Maleki wrote, referring to Tavana and the Iran Social Survey’s use of IranPoll to conduct surveys within Iran.

Noir couldn’t find evidence of IranPoll having ties to the Islamic Republic, and Maleki did not respond when we asked him to elaborate on the allegation. Tavana likewise stated “IranPoll has no connection to the government [of Iran].”

Nonetheless, Maleki seems to allege that IranPoll’s work is evidence that Western universities “are under the control of the regime’s thugs,” as he wrote on X.

If mainstream media citations of GAMAAN’s findings are any indication, Maleki’s tenacity seems to be paying off. Whether you’ve seen it in reports published by the State Department, the American Foreign Policy Council, the government of the United Kingdom, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, FiveThirtyEight, the Guardian, the Economist, CBC, Al-Monitor, the Jerusalem Post, Voice of America, the Wilson Center, DW News, Tablet Magazine, the Hill, the Washington Times, or Christianity Today, there’s a good chance that if you live in the West, GAMAAN has helped shape what you think is happening in Iran. GAMAAN’s rise shows no signs of slowing: the organization announced in January that Maleki had been “selected as the country representative for Iran (2025-2026) in the prestigious World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR).” The Washington Post described WAPOR as “the leading professional association of pollsters working outside the United States.”

For Tavana, GAMAAN isn’t merely worsening academic and mainstream conversation around Iran — it’s potentially even raising the prospect of war between the Islamic Republic and the United States, by inflating perceived anti-regime sentiment among the Iranian populace.

“It wasn’t a very long time ago where, you know, the U.S. invaded another country, largely on the assumption that people who lived in that country wanted the invasion and [welcomed] their liberation… And so I think that, like, trafficking in these half-baked ideas is actually quite dangerous, and it’s going [to], if unchecked, get a lot of people killed,” Tavana said.