Incumbents in electoral authoritarian regimes manipulate elections in a variety of ways in order to retain power. One of the arenas for manipulating elections and ensuring regime survival is the fiscal institution. Using a time-series analysis of the Iranian budgetary process from 1979 to 2014, this study shows that: 1) following the political rift between reformists and conservatives, the incumbent hard-liners have systematically increased public spending before elections, and 2) when the legislature’s composition is more balanced between the hard-liners and soft-liners, budget revisions required by the parliament tend to be more than when the legislature is dominated by hard-liners. The evidence on electoral budget cycle becomes most evident in 2009 when the ruling coalition approved the annual budget proposal with only 18 revisions compared to an average of 150 in previous years, turning the 2009 public budget into the President’s discretionary budget. Fiscal manipulation and discretionary public funds were not only used to direct resources into the rural strongholds of the regime to buy votes, but to reinforce the para-military forces within the regime. These findings have important implications for the literature on institutions in electoral authoritarian regimes and explain the use of economic policies rather than more blunt forms of manipulation such as electoral fraud and violence against the opposition in these regimes.