But ahead of the vote, the Guardian Council, which vets candidates for electoral offices, disqualified thousands of them, including many prominent figures who advocate political reform. At the same time, institutions whose members aren’t popularly elected, including the office of the supreme leader, the Guardian Council, the judiciary, and the security services, are the most powerful in Iran’s government. And they remain in the hands of hardliners.

Another reason it’s difficult to know the significance of these elections—aside from the dueling claims of victory from each camp, and the fact that, as Thomas Erdbink of The New York Times reported Wednesday, “there has been no official comment on the affiliation of the winning candidates”—is that Iran does not have strong political parties. Knowing that Republicans have a majority in the U.S. Congress, for example, gives you a rough sense of that body’s legislative priorities and how they would differ from those of a Democratic Congress. As Majlis Monitor, a website devoted to Iranian politics, notes, “While political parties help us see a country’s political fault-lines, their absence in Iran makes it difficult to understand how politics are actually [organized] and work there.”

There are instead what Majlis Monitor calls “political currents”: “shifting alliances between political groups and prominent individuals, key socio-economic constituencies, and centers of power.” These all add up to the two broad “camps” you’re likely to see described in English-language media: “[T]he reformist and centrist currents ... together form the ‘moderate’ camp; and the traditional and hard-line conservative currents ... constitute the conservative (or ‘[principlist]’) camp.” Hence confusing descriptions of Rouhani’s “moderate-reformist” coalition, which includes some “moderate conservatives” as well as “pragmatic and pro-government forces,” some of whom may even be “centrist.” (In contrast to the “hardliners,” who may even be “extremists” but are at the very least “conservative.”)

As Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told me, “The nomenclature we use to describe Iranian politicians … is sometimes misleading and must be understood in the context of Iranian politics.”

I asked Sadjadpour to explain what the election results mean—for Iran’s voters as well as for the country’s place in the world. A condensed and edited transcript of our conversation, conducted by phone and email, follows.

Kathy Gilsinan: Who or what are moderates in Iran? How much do we know about them?

Karim Sadjadpour: The nomenclature we use to describe Iranian politicians—such as reformists, moderates, and hardliners—is sometimes misleading and must be understood in the context of Iranian politics. While the overall results are inconclusive, the reformist list [of candidates allied to President Rouhani]—called the “List of Hope”—won all 30 of Tehran’s parliamentary seats, but given the mass disqualifications that took place before the election, the majority of these folks are unknown quantities, and a few of them actually self-identify as conservatives.