Organized Violence as a Public Health Concern in the Democratic Republic of Congo

This presentation will build on a nearly complete manuscript about the electoral consequences of armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). John Quattrochi constructed a novel dataset of district-level (n=166) vote counts across three DRCA presidential elections and combined it with publicly available conflict data on a war involving 122 groups. Quattrochi finds that more conflict in the pre-electoral period is associated with higher incumbent vote share in the 2006 election, lower vote share in 2011, and is uncorrelated with vote share in 2018. To investigate these shifting associations, he disaggregated conflict by combatant identity and found that intra-Congolese conflicts are associated with lower incumbent support, whereas conflict with foreign actors is associated with higher incumbent support. This suggests that the president's incentives to provide public goods like security and public health are severely limited.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Global Health Science and Security, the School of Health’s Department of Health Management and Policy and the Department of Global Health, the Center for Global Health Practice and Impact, and the Global Health Institute.

Featured

John Quattrochi is an associate teaching professor at Georgetown University’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and director of the M.S. in Global Health program. His research interests include global health and sustainable development. He has studied cash-like vouchers, water, sanitation, and hygiene, social support, empowerment training, health infrastructure, and public work programs. He partners with key international development actors, including the World Bank and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). He has a doctorate in global health and population from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a Fulbright scholar in Entebbe, Uganda, and a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar in Naples, Italy.