Rural development cooperative bylaw amendment quorums and youth member voice in Tanzania: a regression-discontinuity analysis of attendance thresholds

Rural development cooperatives in Tanzania routinely set attendance quorums for bylaw amendment meetings, and these thresholds are widely assumed to protect collective decision-making. Because quorum thresholds create a discontinuity in the probability that a meeting is valid, they permit a regression-discontinuity design in which youth voice is compared just above and just below the threshold. The analysis is a design and power study, not an empirical estimate: no observational data are used or claimed. Under a between-cluster standard deviation of 6.0, a residual standard deviation of 4.5 and an intraclass correlation of 0.64, the design requires 54 clusters to detect a 5 percentage-point effect at 80 per cent power. Quorum thresholds are a plausible but fragile instrument for youth voice, and that the regression-discontinuity design is feasible only at cluster counts well above those typical of cooperative federations.