Environmental Performance in Authoritarian Regimes: Waste Management in the Russian Regions

This paper studies whether more authoritarian regional governments in Russia are better able to solve the growing problem of waste management. We focus on the case of waste management because there is a significant variation across the regions in terms of waste management efforts. This is puzzling considering the importance of waste management for all regional governments and the urgency of the problem for the Russian population as reflected in public opinion polls. Using a regional panel data set for the period of 2012-2019, we examine whether the degree of competiveness of the regional political regimes can explain the differences in the implementation of waste management policies. We find that our proxy for political regime type - the share of votes for the United Russia party in the parliamentary elections - has a strong positive effect on the share of recycled waste in the Russian regions. These findings support the idea of environmental authoritarianism that suggests that authoritarian governments are better able to quickly mobilize different actors and provide an effective response to environmental challenges. Overall, these results contribute to the scholarship on authoritarian policy-making by focusing on environmental performance at the subnational level in Russia.