The Origins of Modern Local Government in Iran during the Mashruteh Period (Implications for understanding the Islamic City Councils under the Islamic Republic of Iran)

This paper demonstrates that the origins of modern local government in Iran – established by a series of laws passed during two years of the Mashruteh Period, 1906-1907 – reflected the intersection of two sets of forces culminating in a new legal framework establishing a new bureaucratic intergovernmental system. The first was bottom-up pressures from popular grassroots associations, or anjumans, that had been taking shape over the prior decade. These associations aspired for greater voice in the politics of the nation and in the management of their provinces and localities. Scholars such as Afary, Cronin, and others have shed valuable light on this bottom-up dimension. In this paper I argue that a second development which has not received adequate attention from scholars of modern Iranian state building was also at work: top-down measures by the elite lawmakers in the newly established Majlis to craft a modern intergovernmental system in which empowered local government would act as the executive arm of – and partners to – a centralized system of public administration effective throughout the entire country. This was critical for the central government to combat the monarchist counter-revolution and reactionary elites. Ultimately they failed to achieve either objective, and the first experiment in modern local democracy in Iran collapsed. Drawing on recently published archives of the correspondence between local anjumans and the central government, as well an analysis of several laws that have not received detailed attention in the scholarly literature, the paper describes the dual tension faced by the liberal republican centralizers. Drawing on Michael Mann’s theory of dual state power, it offers an interpretation of how the legacy of the failure of the first experiment sheds light on the challenges facing local democracy and state building under the Islamic Republic.