Environmental Politics in Authoritarian Regimes: Waste Management in Russian Regions

Russian regions exhibit significant variation in their waste management efforts, despite the urgency of the problem and the importance of waste management for all regional governments. To examine this variation, we apply the concept of authoritarian environmentalism, which suggests that authoritarian governments have distinctive capabilities for tackling certain environmental challenges. Analysis of a regional panel data set for the period 2012-2019 shows that our measure of the degree of authoritarianism – the share of votes for the ruling party United Russia in parliamentary elections – has a strong positive effect on the share of recycled waste in the Russian regions. This result indicates that more authoritarian regions tend to recycle more household waste than less authoritarian regions. However, it could also be the case that more authoritarian governments are simply more likely to manipulate their environmental statistics to show better environmental performance.