How voting alignment shapes distribution of intergovernmental transfers in tutelary regimes? New preprint by Ilya Vaskin is available

Paper "Buying Loyalty Of Voters Or Local Elites? Political Alignment And Transfers To Provinces In Tutelary Regimes: The Case Of Iran" by Ilya Vaskin, Research Assistant at CInSt, was published at SSRN and HSE Working Papers.

The paper investigates the role of the voting alignment for the distribution of intergovernmental transfers among subnational elites and ordinary voters in the tutelary regime. The type of regime is a hybrid: it has competitive and unpredictable elections at the national and sub-national levels. However, the power of elected bodies is limited by the unelected ones.
The research uses the case of Iran; the database covers 330 observations for 30/31 provinces for 2005-2015. Ilya Vaskin found that the transfers for elites are negatively connected with the voting. Herewith, transfers for voters do not depend on the voting alignment at all. Ilya Vaskin explains the results by the intra-elite competition that is typical for the regimes. The competition promotes the struggle for votes and enforces elites to invest money into underdeveloped provinces to receive more support during the next elections. Moreover, the researcher put the research into the context of the Iranian welfare state that was shaped by the same competition of Iranian elites.

To read the full paper, please follow the link