Political Coordination Without a Ruling Party: Informal Networks in Post-Revolutionary Iran

The Islamic Republic of Iran dissolved its only ruling party in 1987 and has governed its provinces ever since without the organisation that comparative politics treats as essential to durable authoritarian rule. Yet elections have been held continuously, elites have circulated at extraordinary rates---roughly two in three parliamentary incumbents and four in five city councillors are replaced each cycle---and mass participation has persisted, with some 273,000 candidates registering for a single round of local elections. This article asks how political coordination is accomplished at the subnational level in the structural absence of party organisation. Drawing on original electoral data covering all eleven parliamentary terms and on remote qualitative fieldwork in Khuzestan Province, it argues that durable, territorially embedded informal networks---kinship and tribal structures, religious associations, patronage hierarchies, and economic coalitions---perform the coordinating functions normally attributed to ruling parties. Read through Gramsci's account of hegemony and the integral state, these networks constitute decentralised sites of consent production that complement, rather than replace, coercive and institutional power. The case of Dezful illustrates the mechanism. The argument specifies a model of network-based hegemony with implications for the study of authoritarian durability, party substitution, and informal institutions beyond Iran.