Rural Development Sociology of Village Land Dispute Tribunal Composition Quotas and Women's Inheritance Claim Withdrawal in Ugandan Sub-Counties: An Instrumental-Variable Analysis of Panel Assignment

Village land dispute tribunals in Ugandan sub-counties are required to include women among their members, yet the effect of this composition quota on women's inheritance claim withdrawal remains contested. The central problem is that tribunal composition is not randomly assigned: claims involving women's inheritance are routed to panels on the basis of claim characteristics that also influence withdrawal, so naive comparisons of withdrawal rates across panels conflate the quota's effect with selection. The administrative rules governing panel rotation within sub-county tribunals generate quasi-random variation in the proportion of women on the panel that hears a given claim, conditional on claim type and filing month. An instrumental-variable design is specified in which the instrument is the leave-one-out mean of women's quota compliance among panels sitting in the same sub-county and month, and the endogenous regressor is the actual share of women on the assigned panel. The paper derives the conditions under which this instrument satisfies the exclusion restriction, specifies the first-stage and reduced-form equations, and identifies the threats to identification that arise from panel attrition, claim re-routing and the co-assignment of quota-compliant panels to claims with stronger documentary evidence. It contributes a transferable identification strategy for the sociological study of customary adjudication bodies, a set of testable propositions linking descriptive representation to claim withdrawal, and a boundary condition: the instrument identifies a local average treatment effect for claims heard by panels whose composition is sensitive to rotation, not for the full population of inheritance claims. The framework is developed for application to sub-county tribunal records and does not report empirical estimates.