Challenges for Local Democracy in Iran: A Study of Islamic City Councils

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Notes

¹ See further Ali Madanipour (1998) Tehran: The Making of a Metropolis (Chichester: Wiley).

² Mozafar Sarafi (2003) Toward a theory of informal settlement [in Persian] Faslnameh-e haft shahr, 8, pp. 5–11.

³ James Coleman (1990) Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).

⁴ Francis Fukuyama (1995) Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free Press).

⁵ Robert D. Putnam (1993) Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

⁶ Charles Boix and Daniel N. Posner (1998) Social capital: Explaining its origins and effects on government performance, British Journal of Political Science, 28(4), pp. 686–698.

⁷ Alexis De Tocqueville (1990) Democracy in America (New York: Vintage).

⁸ Tom W. Rice & Alexander F. Sumberg (1997) Civic culture and governmental performance in the American states, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, (Winter, 1997), pp. 99–114; and Tom W. Rice (2001) Social capital and government performance in Iowa communities, Journal of Urban Affairs, (Fall, 2001), pp. 375–389.

⁹ Pamela Paxton (2002) Social capital and democracy: An interdependent relationship, American Sociological Review, (April, 2002), pp. 254–277.

¹⁰ Clause Offe & Susanne Fuchs (2002) A decline of social capital: The German case, in: R. Putnam (Ed.), Democracies in Flux, pp. 189–243, (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

¹¹ See Anirudh Krishna (2002) Active Social Capital (New York: Columbia University Press).

¹² See David Silverman (1995) Qualitative Methodology and Sociology (Aldershot: Gower).

¹³ See Catherine Marshall & Gretchen B. Rossman (1999) Designing Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage).

¹⁴ An interview either can be completely structured, with predetermined questions and arrangements, or completely unstructured, without determining anything in advance. However, the most common type of interview in the qualitative method is the semi-structured interview with a collection of questions and discussions that do not follow a fully predetermined arrangement, but are in the form of a checklist containing the questions and topics.

¹⁵ Open Coding: The analytic process through which concepts are identified and their properties and dimensions are discovered in data.

¹⁶ See Anselm Strauss & Juliet Corbin (1998) Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications).

¹⁷ Axial Coding: The process of relating categories to their subcategories; termed ‘axial’ because coding occurs around the axis of a category, linking categories at the level of properties and dimensions.

¹⁸ Selective Coding: The process of integrating and refining the theory.

¹⁹ Paradigm: An analytic tool devised to help analysts integrate structure with process.

²⁰ Triangulation: Use of multiple and different sources, methods, investigators, and theories to provide corroborating evidence; see further John W. Creswell (1998) Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Traditions (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998).

²¹ Theoretical Saturation: The point in category development at which no new properties, dimensions, or relationships emerge during analysis.

²² See Hossein Bashiriye (2003) The Obstacles to Political Development in Iran [in Persian] (Tehran: Gam 'eN.).

²³ Max Weber (1968) City (New York: The Free Press).

²⁴ Ahmad Ashraf (1974) Historical features of urbanization in Iran: Islamic era' [in Persian], Nameh-ye olum-e ejtemai, 1(4), p. 49.

²⁵ Manoochehr Sabori Kashani Nejad (1975) Decision-making and participation: The study of city councils in contemporary decentralization system [in Persian] (Tehran: Institute for Social Studies and Researches, University of Tehran).

²⁶ Ali Reza Mohseni Tabrizi, et al. (1994) The Study of Advisory Associations of Imam Jamaat and Local Trustees in Tehran Regions [In Persian] (Tehran: Tehran Municipality's Institute of Social Studies).

²⁷ Article 136 of the Third Plan, adopted in 1998, reads: ‘Taking into account the capabilities of the municipalities, government is authorized to delegate to municipalities those functions of the executive agencies pertaining to the municipal administration as deemed necessary and recommended jointly by the Ministry of the Interior and the State Administrative and Employment Affairs Organization, together with the required financial resources.’

²⁸ Mostafa Azkia (1991) An Introduction to Rural Development Sociology [in Persian] (Tehran:Ettela' at Publishing), p. 73.

²⁹ See further the polls conducted in these cities after the 1999 local elections by the Islamic Students Polling Agency (ISPA); full citations for all of them are in the References.

³⁰ According to Article 100 of the Municipalities Law, this commission (committee), one of whose members must be a city councilor, shall decide on violations of rules in urban construction. Since the commissions in large cities frequently cite large numbers of urban constructors for violations, such as exceeding the construction limits set out in their construction licenses or changing their applications without notice, contractors often try to influence commission members to reduce fines for construction violations.