10 - What of the Future of Local Democracy?

Summary

Chapter 10 situates the findings of the book in the main lines of literature on Iran state-building: state centralization and its contradictions; authoritarian persistence; social welfare compact between state and citizens; and the challenges of democratization. The chapter also assesses the implications of the Iran experience for conventional expectations of the democracy-decentralization nexus. The chapter explains why the main lines of literature on modern Iranian state-building fail to explain what motivated the IRI to adopt political decentralization or to explain the timing when it finally did so. Nor does this scholarship distinguish the two dimensions of centralization emphasized in this book. Moreover, scholarship on Iranian state-building has thus far not engaged with the theory of electoral authoritarianism; my findings give strong support to this theory, which explains how the regime effectively deploys local electoral politics to enhance its dominance. Electoral authoritarianism moreover explains how the two forms of state power – the despotic and infrastructural – can be combined in the management of subnational divisions of the nation’s territory. Finally, the findings of the book undermine the claim, associated with writers such as Mahmoud Taleghani or Alexis de Tocqueville, that there is an necessary and causal relationship between decentralization and democratization. The book shows how political and electoral decentralization can be compatible with authoritarian state-building.