83rd Annual Midwest Political Science Association Conference

Sergei Utkin, research assistant at ICSID, spoke at MPSA Conference 2026.

Sergei presented the article "A Tale of Two Railroads: Environmental Issues and Voting Behavior in the Russian North" (co‑authored by Evgeny Sedashov and Yaroslav Snarski, HSE University).

This paper examines the effects of environmental hazards on protest voting. Drawing on the unique context of Russia's Arkhangelsk region, we show that proximity to a politically salient hazardous area is associated with increased protest voting. During the period under consideration, two major landfill projects were planned in the region, Rikasikha and Shiyes, but only the latter became the subject of a large-scale information and protest campaign. Hence, we test whether environmental hazards from landfills directly influence protest voting, or whether the effect emerges only when such hazards attract significant media and activist attention. Our findings demonstrate that Shiyes was a driver of protest voting, while Rikasikha had no effect, corroborating the media attention hypothesis. Furthermore, the effect operates directly through geographic proximity and is not mediated by associated local protest mobilization events. Distance from a politically relevant landfill, therefore, serves as the principal driver of protest voting.