Interdisciplinary Sociology of Rural Burial Society Funeral Benefit Payout Delays and Widow Land Tenure Security in Ugandan Sub-County Associations: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Claim Filing Thresholds

Burial societies across rural Uganda disburse funeral benefits through sub-county associations whose claim-filing rules create sharp thresholds: a widow who files within a stipulated window receives a lump sum that can be used to defend her occupancy of matrimonial land, while a widow who files late receives a reduced or delayed payment. the present analysis treats those thresholds as the identification device for a regression discontinuity design and asks whether the design can recover the effect of timely payout on tenure security with the cluster counts that sub-county associations actually possess. No observational data are analysed. The paper characterises the operating characteristics of the design under a declared variance structure with a between-cluster standard deviation of 6.0, a residual standard deviation of 4.5 and an intraclass correlation of 0.64, using a before-after-control-impact estimator evaluated across 2000 replications per design cell for cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points. Power is low at the smallest cluster counts and rises with both cluster count and effect size; 56 clusters are required to detect a 5 percentage point effect at 80 per cent power. The threshold design is defensible only where associations aggregate across sub-counties, and it specifies the conditions under which a filed claim can be treated as a valid instrument for tenure security.