Sharif Digital Repository

Destruction of green lands, especially forests, is one of the most common forms of environmental degradation. Meanwhile, political institutions can play an important role in protecting or destroying the environment, especially forests. The creation of town and village councils as a change in political institutions and decentralization can have an impact on the environment. Land use change, implementation of development projects and the task of overseeing the implementation of environmental protection laws are among the duties and powers of councils that affect the coverage of various areas. At different eras, town and village councils’ elections have been annulled or dissolved in a... 

One of the most famous criteria to measure the optimality of the election result in the metric space is the amount of distortion. In this framework, the cost of choosing each candidate is considered equal to the total distance of the community members from that candidate. With this definition, the candidate who has the lowest selection cost among all the candidates is called the optimal candidate. The amount of distortion for an electoral mechanism is equal to the maximum amount of the cost of selecting the selected candidate divided by the cost of selecting the desired candidate. It turns out that no deterministic voting mechanism can guarantee a distortion value better than 3. Various... 

The correlation between religious adherence and voter turnout is widely studied. However, whether the relation is causal is an open question. We use Household Expenditures and Income Survey (HEIS) data in Iran, which encompasses nine distinct religious expenditures. These expenditures have low correlation with each other and represent different aspects of religious adherence. We use Imamzadeh (some historical holy shrines) as Instruments to estimate the causal effect of religious expenditures on voter turnout. The results reveal that religious expenditures influence both presidential and parliamentary voter turnout, with a notably stronger impact on presidential elections