The Islamic Republic of Iran consolidates its state control and authority through the imprisonment of dissidents, transcending incarcerating those convicted of a crime. It asserts power against society by targeting political activists, journalists, minorities, and anyone who contests them or their propaganda. This in addition to legitimizing its authority under its legal system forms the basis of its power as the legislative institutions (through trials, sentencing and imprisonments), play the role of silencing dissidents that would jeopardize its own existence and discourses. Islamic Republic of Iran is constantly denying the existence of any political prisoners alongside giving political captives vague charges like: “Baghi” (armed enmity against the state), “Muḥāribah” (enmity against state/god), “Afsad-i fil Arz” (perpetuating corruption on the earth), and two massively given vague charges of “spreading propaganda against the system” and “endangering national security” which all point to the state concern of losing sovereignty. The Iranian state perpetuates numerous executions, giving heavy charges to prisoners, and setting up inconspicuous trials to show the state’s own sovereignty. This concern increases especially during the post-societal movements. One of the greatest concerns of the state is anything that can endanger its sovereignty and power, and it will demonstrate its own power through its institutions. Moreover, the Islamic Republic of Iran is keen on an iron fist as they perpetuate negative punishments and make the charges heavier as time passes, increasing more as collective movements threaten their power. This trend bares out from the increased rates of imprisonment, raising bail costs, increasing charges for captured dissidents and prolonging years of imprisonment. This research alongside the memoirs of the I.R.’s prisoners, is using works like Women and the Islamic Republic: How Gendered Citizenship Conditions the Iranian State (2022), Abolition. Feminism. Now (2022), The End Times of Human Rights (2013), Dancing the Carceral Creep: The Anti-Domestic Violence Movement and the Paradoxical Pursuit of Criminalization, 1973 – 1986 (2015), Anti-Carceral Feminism: The Contradictions of Progress and the Possibilities of Counter-Hegemonic Struggle (2020), All of Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence (2019), When Victims Become Killers (2001), in addition to many more. My goal in writing this is to show the pattern of the Islamic Republic of Iran maintaining its sovereignty through imprisonment and patterns of creating harsher charges that both act as a message to anyone who would contest its own power.

How does democratic backsliding influence the behavior of political parties within legislatures? Despite extensive research on legislative behavior in stable democracies and, to a lesser extent, autocracies, the dynamics within transitioning political landscapes remain less explored. This study investigates the nuanced impacts of democratic erosion on party cohesion and ideological polarization, drawing on a unique dataset of speeches from the Turkish Grand National Assembly (2002-2023). Findingsfrom correspondance analysis and two-way fixed effects analysis indicate that democratic backsliding correlates with a reduction in the dimensionality of political speech, stronger intra-party cohesion, and broader ideological divides between parties, except in discussions on resource distribution where these trends reverse. Additionally, the research explores the strategic importance of Members of Parliament's (MPs) adherence to party ideology in such contexts, uncovering a divergence in strategies between opposition and ruling parties. By mapping these changes against the backdrop of Turkey's political evolution over two decades-long AKP rule, the study aims to offer a deeper understanding of how political parties and MPs adapt to and reflect the changing contours of democracy, contributing to the literature on authoritarian legislatures and democratic backsliding.

What roles do constitutions play in authoritarian regimes? It has long been argued that constitutions have no meaningful function in closed authoritarian settings and serve as window dressing or simply underline a dictator’s dominance. However, more recent research suggests that constitutions, similar to elections and parliaments, may not be a mere pretence but can foster the durability of authoritarian regimes, such as by facilitating coordination between different regime centres. This paper aims to contribute to the debate on authoritarian constitutions by moving beyond this functionalist approach. It argues that constitutions in non-democracies can be dynamic documents at the heart of conflicts between diverse interests within the regime, which their analysis from the optic of regime stability might belie. To do so, we analyse the case of the Iranian constitution, showing that the circumstances that surrounded its drafting in 1979, as well as its revision in 1989, contributed to the document becoming a focal point for the functioning of the Iranian regime while at the same time created a space for a constitutional conflict between the Supreme Leader (SL) and the president. We then focus on the tenures of two Iranian presidents, a reformist Muhammad Khatami (1997–2005) and a neoconservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005–2013) to understand, firstly, how they employed the constitution in rhetoric and practice. Secondly, we consider the challenges these efforts faced from the Guardian Council (GC), the main judicial body with the authority to interpret the Iranian constitution, closely aligned with the SL. We demonstrate that both presidents frequently invoked constitutional provisions to assert independence and pursue their different political goals. Through an elaborate constitutional procedure, the GC then sought, and mostly succeeded, in safeguarding the status quo characterized by the primacy of conservative institutions. This paper argues that, akin to democracies, constitutions in non-democratic settings are not just successful coordination devices but can be both tools and objects of a conflict between different intra-regime interests. We base our findings on analysis of 478 legal documents published by the GC as well as secondary sources on the history of the Iranian Constitution.

Scholars argue that Turkey has been experiencing a democratic backsliding since 2010 under the leadership of Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and has become a competitive authoritarian regime in the mid-2010s (Ozbudun 2015; Oktem&Akkoyunlu 2016; Esen&Gumuscu 2016; Yesil 2018; Caliskan 2018). This new regime of Erdogan’s Turkey, like its counterparts all around the world, combines competitive elections at national and subnational levels with authoritarian tactics designed to manipulate the electoral landscape, ensuring the triumph of autocratic incumbents (Schedler, 2009; Levitsky and Way, 2010; Bermeo, 2016; Waldner and Lust, 2018). This strategic combination allows Erdogan to solidify his control over executive offices and public resources. However, much of Erdogan’s dominance has been territorially uneven and mostly limited to the national level. At the subnational level, despite attracting most of the voters, Erdogan and AKP could not always win all the subnational executive offices, providing the opposition parties with the opportunity to govern a territory within a nationally authoritarian context, and since 2019, the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) governs the three largest cities, Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir. Even though the opposition parties frequently take advantage of competitive elections at the subnational level also in other similar regime contexts, existing studies have offered limited insights into opposition-led subnational offices. This paper aims to explore the characteristics of such opposition-led subnational executive offices, which I will term opposition pockets, examining the variations among them, and evaluating their impact on the opposition’s struggle against the national-level autocratic incumbent. I argue that opposition pockets vary in terms of the timing of their emergence, the treatment they receive from the autocratic incumbent, and their performance in governance. These variations, in turn, shape the opposition’s capacity to transform their offices into channels of confrontation, ultimately influencing the national-level struggle against the autocratic incumbent. To support these arguments, I conducted 12 months of fieldwork in Turkey where I collected administrative data, examined archival resources and public opinion surveys, and conducted in-depth interviews with politicians. By analyzing the opposition pockets in Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir, the three largest cities, and Diyarbakir, the largest city in the Kurdish region, the paper sheds light on the dynamics between opposition parties and autocratic incumbents at both sub-national and national levels and contributes to our understanding of how variations in these pockets impact the opposition's capacity to generate new channels to challenge the autocratic incumbent.

Why do independent judiciaries fail to constrain democratic erosion and to institutionalize judicial constraints on the executive over time? Conventional wisdom holds that independent courts can defend democracy, especially when fragmentation of power among political parties protects judicial independence. I argue instead that courts can enable democratic erosion, even when power is fragmented. I theorize that the partisan biases of the judiciary shape both whether courts constrain aspiring autocrats in the short term and whether judicial constraints on the executive become stably institutionalized over the long run. When courts have partisan biases against incumbent governments, they are more likely to engage in aggressive judicial activism—thereby encouraging a “judicialization” of the opposition’s strategy and encouraging government attacks on the courts. Connecting short-term strategic interactions with long-run patterns, I argue that judicial constraints on the executive fail to institutionalize when historical legacies of repression tie the judiciary to one side of a polarized partisan divide. I test this theory in Turkey during the 2000s, where an independent judiciary aggressively ruled against the elected government yet failed to limit democratic backsliding. The paper leverages an original quantitative dataset of 3,000 decisions issued by Turkey’s Constitutional Court as well as interviews with high-ranking Turkish judges.

As the elections for the Islamic Consultative Assembly and for the Assembly of Experts are held in Iran in 2024, extensive disqualification of reformist candidates has posed a serious impediment to meaningful political participation. This has, in turn, resurfaced discussions on obstacles to political development in the post-revolutionary Iran. Indeed, the main criticism of the elections in Iran is focused on the disqualification of reformist candidates both in parliamentary and presidential elections as well as in elections for the Assembly of Experts. Many believe that the Guardian Council has gone beyond its authority to supervise the elections. According to the election law, the Guardian Council must supervise the Executive Electoral Boards, which are charged with examining the qualifications of the candidates. There are certain characteristics that are interpretable and vague such as believing in Islam, to be faithful to the tutelage of the jurisprudent, and to be committed to the Islamic Republic system. The main question this research seeks to answer is: What factors led to the rise of elections engineering in recent years and what will be its implications for political development in Iran? The hypothesis in response to the main question is that the Guardian Council has interpreted requirements for the candidates in a peculiar manner in order to disqualify those who could possibly challenge the electoral victory of the conservative political faction particularly within the past four years. This in turn will pose serious obstacles to the process of political development in Iran. Elections engineering is actually a term openly used in Iran to describe recent elections in which the process of disqualification assured that the reformists had no chance to run candidates for most of the seats in the parliament, presidency or Assembly of Experts. This has transformed the Iranian political system into an electoral authoritarian one with severe consequences for the legitimacy of the government. Iranian electoral system used to be elections with limited choices, but it has evolved into elections without choices, thus curtailing Iranian people’s chances for meaning political participation. Keywords: Elections Engineering, Assembly of Experts, Guardian Council, Political Development, Political Participation