Parliamentary politics and the democratic reform in Iran The failure of democratic reform and the rise of populism in Iranian politics in the past decade have motivated scholars and analysts to provide an explanation for this phenomenon. Existing explanations generally highlight the role of Iran’s unelected institutions. However, the significant role of parliamentary politics in this process has been relatively overlooked. This paper argues that pursuing democratization agenda through the Iranian parliament ran afoul of deep-seated existing parliamentary settings of Iran and led to an abortive attempt to reform Iran’s political institutions. That is, Iran’s parliamentary politics is associated with clientelism as well as routine administrative tasks. However, in the reformist era, a period of drastic change in legislative process emerged which was unsuccessful in breaking through the established parliamentary politics of Iran. The first part of the paper explores the dynamic of clientelism in Iran’s parliamentary politics through the interviews with some members of the parliament and activists. The findings of this section show that clientelistic accountability is dominant in the relationship between citizens and the members of the Parliament in Iran. The Iranian MPs (Members of Parliament) are assumed to deliver private goods in their districts as a routine responsibility, and only few question the legitimacy of private goods disbursement by MPs. The primary mechanism of this clientelistic linkage is the politicized disbursement of private goods such as jobs, low interest rate loan, permit for industrial activities and other tangible goods to the electorate through the local bureaucracy. The secondary way of maintaining this linkage is through the allocation of club goods that provide benefit for the local constituencies and impose costs on the national level such as hard infrastructures in the district. Afterwards, the paper explicates the difficulties of the reformists in breaking through this established clientelistic politics. That is, the reformists tried to prioritize democratization in the legislative process by expanding the scope of conflict over the issue of democratic reform to change this subsystem. They were successful in enlarging the scope of conflict in the early stages. However, when the issue declined from the public attention, the existing system remained in place, and pursuing democratic change through Iran’s parliament failed.