An application of the systemic thinking approach in analyzing the role of economic and financial factors in the formation of local government in Iran

Adopting the decentralization policy and developing local institutions are among the features of political organization of space in the current century which has a growing trend in all over the world. One of the reasons for this issue is the fact that most of the countries use the decentralization process for improving the performance of the public sections and their economic growth. Based on the effective application of the systemic thinking approach in studying and analyzing different economic, social and management sectors, the present study uses this method to explore the role of economic-financial factors in the formation of local governments.
The method is descriptive, analytic and inferential and the data are collected using the library-based and field approaches. For the latter, quantitative and qualitative approaches are used. In the quantitative phase, the participants of the study were 40 experts in local government. In the qualitative phase, seven scholars in the same filed were selected based on the snowball sampling method for interviews. For examining the effects economic-financial factors in the formation of local governments, the independent sample t-test and to prioritize the effects of each of the relevant factors, the Friedman test was run. For drawing the causal diagrams based on the systemic thinking model, the Vensim software was applied.
Findings: The results indicated that the effect of economic-financial factors for the formation of local government in Iran is medium to low and current status of this factor for the formation of local government is weak.