This research project has two interconnected goals. First, it attempts to unpack and redefine ‘hybrid regimes’ – a concept that has emerged from the ‘third wave’ democratisation literature in the late 1990s and shares with this literature its underlying cultural, ideological and teleological assumptions. I start with a critique of these dominant assumptions and point to the need to rethink hybrid regimes outside of these parameters. I then propose a more limited and lucid definition for hybrid regimes as political systems built on two contesting sources of legitimacy – elitist and popular – and corresponding institutions of guardianship and democracy. Hybrid regimes, in other words, are not ‘diminished democracies’ or ‘competitive autocracies’, but an altogether separate regime type that feature clearly defined tutelary and electoral institutions. Based on this redefinition, I present five hypotheses regarding the dynamics of change in hybrid regimes, which are subsequently applied to the two case studies: the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of Turkey. The second goal of the thesis is to present a new comparative framework to analyse the post-Cold War dynamics of change in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of Turkey...

Who gets what, when and how? Each of the three papers in this thesis makes a distinct contribution to answering this question in the context of the political economy of South Africa. The first paper examines how South Africa’s public financial management system distributes central government funds to its provinces. Using a unique panel dataset comprising all provinces and three elections over the period 1995-2010, I demonstrate that provinces where the national ruling party has higher vote margins receive higher per capita equitable shares in pre-election years. This result suggests that even in a dominant party framework, electoral competition can function as an incentive to implement political budget cycles. The second paper evaluates how the extension of the franchise affected the delivery of electricity to South African households. The dataset combines nightlight satellite imagery, census data and municipal election results, making it possible to exploit the heterogeneity in the share of newly enfranchised voters across nearly 800 municipalities with a difference-in-differences approach. The analysis demonstrates that enfranchisement has a significant positive effect on household electrification. Moreover, the findings show that political parties have a potential mediating role in accounting for service delivery patterns in new democracies. The third paper addresses the problem of measurement in studying public service delivery by examining a novel methodology for combining census-based data with satellite imagery of the world at night. Using cross-national data and South African census data...