In 1999, the Islamic Republic of Iran established elected local government by holding nationwide elections for city and village councils. Competing actors hoped it would support distinct outcomes: Islamization, administrative efficiency, and democratization. This chapter describes the underlying logic of these motivations and their outcomes over the two decades since: in the main, the triumph of Islamization and technocracy. It explores the regime’s use of local government and administrative law to undercut the democratizing potential of political decentralization through two arenas of local politics. The regime controlled the scope of local political participation through widespread disqualification of opposition individuals and political parties. The regime also severely restricted the autonomy of elected local government in passing legislation. This institutionalized elected local government as a subordinate administrative tier of the regime rather than a local partner in subnational governance. The chapter concludes that political decentralization in Iran is best interpreted through the theory of electoral authoritarianism and is best viewed historically as an integral part of building Iran’s authoritarian Islamic state.

Chapter 1 describes the motivations of the Islamists, who crafted what became the 1996 Local Councils Law. In the face of protests and riots in the nation’s cities, Islamist lawmakers in the fourth Islamic Majles (1992–1996) turned to political decentralization to address poorly managed urbanization and local governance as a way of easing economic stresses among lower economic classes that had spurred unrest. The chapter explores the 1996 Local Councils Law in detail, including the structure and the responsibilities of elected local government comprising three institutions: the elected Islamic city council (shura-ye eslami shahr), the mayor (shahrdar), and the municipal bureaucracy (shahrdari). The chapter goes on to explain the institutional design and structure of elected local government and its place in the intergovernmental system resulting from the decentralization reforms. It highlights the tension between two parallel vertical systems of hierarchical governance, between the top-down appointed system bureaucratic hierarchy and the bottom-up. The contradiction between the two systems results from the tension between two counterpoised systems of upward and downward accountability.