Rural Sociology of Village Land Use Planning Committee Seat Allocation Rules and Women's Parcel Registration Withdrawal in Rwandan Cell Assemblies: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Representation Thresholds

The central problem is that reserved-seat thresholds, intended to guarantee women's representation on land governance committees, may produce a withdrawal effect when women's substantive influence is perceived as contingent on numerical presence rather than institutional authority. The paper formalises a representation-threshold mechanism in which the gap between descriptive and substantive representation generates a withdrawal calculus for women considering formalising land parcels. Using a regression discontinuity design applied to the DHS Program indicator 'Own land alone [Women]' across 30 African countries and 66 country-survey observations from 2010 to 2025, the analysis examines whether representation thresholds predict discontinuities in women's sole land ownership. The sample mean is 7.255 per cent (SD = 6.14), with country values ranging from 0.70 per cent in Egypt to 32.90 per cent in Comoros. Seat allocation rules function as institutional signals whose sociological force operates through perceived legitimacy rather than through formal authority alone. The contribution is a mechanism specification that connects committee composition rules to household land registration behaviour, with implications for how reserved-seat thresholds are designed and sequenced in decentralised land governance.