Opportunities for Public Participation Influence on the Russian Waste Management Reform: Statistical Analysis

The article is devoted to the analysis of the opportunities for civic participation to influence the results of policy processes in hybrid regimes on the example of the modern Russian waste management reform. The goal of the article is to identify to what extent and under what conditions civic participation was a significant factor in the outputs of the reform in the regions. Based on the provisions of the concepts of authoritarian responsiveness and regional political regimes, assumptions were made about the significance of the factor of civic participation under conditions of combination with certain features of the regions: the level of consolidation of the political system, the openness of the regional bureaucracy, and the degree of dependence on the federal center. Data for 69 constituent entities of the Russian Federation for 2018–2019 were analyzed by statistical methods (models of ordinal and logistic regressions). The results of the analysis show that civic participation was a significant factor in reform outcomes in regions with less transparent bureaucracies and in regions less dependent on the center. At the same time, apart from these conditions, the level of civic participation was not a significant factor in itself. Thus, we can conclude that in hybrid regimes, civic participation can be a significant factor in the policy process if a) the elites are more susceptible to the risks of protest activity (in regions less dependent on the center, the support of the population is more important to the authorities), or b ) if there are informal channels of interaction between the state and society (regions with more closed administrations), which is consistent with the provisions of the concept of authoritarian responsiveness. In turn, the results of the study testify in favor of the “limited pluralism” approach, according to which civic participation in nondemocracies, although performing the main function of ensuring regime stability, can nevertheless have a significant impact on the outcomes of policy processes under certain conditions.