Indigenous Chieftaincy Succession Disputes and Community-Level Trust in Northern Ghana: An Instrumental-Variable Estimation of Customary Authority Legitimacy and Collective Efficacy

Chieftaincy succession disputes in Northern Ghana are widely assumed to erode community trust and customary authority, yet the causal direction and magnitude of this relationship remain poorly identified because disputes are endogenous to the same local conditions that shape trust. the present analysis develops a design-based framework for estimating the effect of succession disputes on community-level trust using an instrumental-variable strategy that exploits plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of chiefly funerals and the genealogical distance between competing claimants. Because no observational data are analysed here, the paper characterises the operating characteristics of the proposed before-after-control-impact estimator under a declared variance structure: between-cluster standard deviation of 6.0, residual standard deviation of 4.5, and an intraclass correlation of 0.64. Power was estimated 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. The design achieves 80% power at 52 clusters for a 5-percentage-point effect. Instrumental-variable estimation of customary authority legitimacy is feasible at community scale, and that the intraclass correlation of 0.64 imposes a binding constraint on the number of clusters required for credible inference.