Rural Interdisciplinary Sociology of Village Assembly Meeting Quorum Rules and Non-Attendance Penalty Enforcement in Malian Commune Councils: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Quorum Thresholds

Village assembly quorum rules in Malian commune councils create sharp thresholds at which non-attendance penalties switch from discretionary to mandatory, making regression discontinuity designs attractive for estimating the causal effect of penalty enforcement on subsequent participation. The operating characteristics of such designs, however, depend on the intraclass correlation of attendance across villages, which is high in rural Malian settings because participation is structured by lineage, age-grade and partisan networks. the present analysis characterises the power of a before-after-control-impact estimator for a regression discontinuity design at commune-council quorum thresholds, using a declared variance structure with between-cluster standard deviation of 6.0, residual standard deviation of 4.5 and intraclass correlation of 0.640. Power was estimated across 2000 design cells defined by cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points. The analysis indicates that 56 clusters are required to detect a 5 percentage point effect at 80 per cent power under this variance structure, and that minimum detectable effects decline steeply between 8 and 24 clusters before flattening. The results imply that commune-level evaluations of quorum-rule enforcement in Mali are likely underpowered unless they aggregate across multiple communes or exploit the threshold with a larger number of village-level clusters than is typical in decentralisation research.