This dissertation examines the political economy of authoritarianism in modern Iran by analyzing how economic conditions, institutional structures, and political selection mechanisms shape political instability, electoral participation, and subnational governance. Across three essays, it studies the relationship between state capacity, social welfare, political behavior, and administrative control during the late Pahlavi monarchy and the Islamic Republic. The first essay investigates Iran’s economic environment between 1960 and 1979. It constructs a Fiscal Capacity of the Government Index and a Household Welfare Index using a Mamdani-type fuzzy inference system with expert-calibrated membership functions. The indices are compared with alternative measures based on principal component analysis, and fuzzy hypothesis testing is used to assess the relationship between fiscal capacity, household welfare, and political instability. The findings indicate that the gap between state fiscal capacity and household welfare widened before the 1979 Revolution. The strongest support is found for the configuration in which government fiscal capacity is high while household welfare remains low. The second essay examines whether economic adversity mobilizes or demobilizes voters in Iran’s electoral-authoritarian system. Using a province–election panel covering six presidential elections between 2001 and 2021, it estimates the relationship between voter turnout and a misery index combining inflation and unemployment. Fixed-effects models, alternative estimators, instrumental-variable analysis, and spatial econometric methods consistently show that greater economic adversity is associated with higher voter turnout. This result supports an interpretation of elections as institutionally constrained arenas for expressing economic grievances. The third essay studies how competence and political loyalty affect the careers of provincial governors. Using an original province–year dataset covering all 31 Iranian provinces from 2000 to 2020, it analyzes gubernatorial retention, rotation, and dismissal through panel-data and instrumental-variable methods. The results suggest that greater competence increases the probability of gubernatorial exit, particularly through rotation, while the effects of political loyalty are weaker and less stable. This pattern is consistent with the strategic redeployment of capable administrators across provinces. Together, the essays show how authoritarian regimes manage tensions between economic performance, welfare provision, political participation, and administrative control.
