"Bullets and Blessings: Effects of Protracted Conflicts on Distributive Politics in Developing States "

How does the presence and type of protracted conflict affect developing states’ resource-allocating decisions? Literature suggests that militarized conflicts hinder economic development, effective governance and democratic sustainability; however, findings on patterns of public goods provision during conflict periods are ambivalent.  Do states change their allocating preferences in times of conflict? Under what conditions, in what spheres, and in what direction do these changes occur? We contribute to this body of work by introducing a theoretical model that explores the relationship between conflict and distributive politics in developing democracies by making two arguments: first, protracted conflict brings about a decline in public goods provision. Second, when disaggregating the conflict dynamics, we find that frequency and scope of violence inform patterns of public goods provision. We test our theory with a broadly comparative subset of developing states experiencing protracted conflicts from the Southeastern European region and post-Soviet republics during the period of 1990-2015. We employ two complementary methodological approaches: a multivariate empirical analysis and qualitative evidence from select case studies across the regions.