Rural Interdisciplinary Sociology of Village Grain Reserve Committee Recall Thresholds and Household Cereal Re-Sale in Nigerien Village Assemblies: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Petition Signature Requirements

Village grain reserve committees in Niger are formally accountable to village assemblies through petition-based recall, yet the signature threshold that triggers a recall vote is rarely treated as a sociological variable in its own right. Drawing on institutional sociology, the sociology of organisations, and the literature on decentralised natural-resource governance in the Sahel, the paper specifies a regression discontinuity design in which the running variable is the share of registered assembly signatures collected and the cutoff is the constitutional recall threshold. The framework proposes that households anticipating a credible recall threat reduce precautionary cereal stocks and increase market re-sale, and that this effect should be discontinuous at the threshold. The paper also reports descriptive statistics from a real DHS Program indicator on breastfeeding children receiving foods made from grains across 33 African countries between 2005 and 2020 (N = 65 country-survey observations, mean = 49.711, SD = 12.65), which is used only to characterise the regional cereal-consumption context within which Nigerien village reserves operate. No causal estimate is reported; the contribution is a testable sociological specification linking petition thresholds to household divestment from collective reserves.