Interdisciplinary sociology of rural development cooperative membership-fee deferral votes and women's collective-marketing participation in Senegal: an event-study of assembly-quorum thresholds

The central problem is that membership-fee deferral votes, which determine whether cash-constrained members retain voting rights and marketing access, are decided at assemblies whose quorum rules are rarely examined as gendered institutions. Drawing on institutional sociology, feminist political economy, and the literature on cooperative governance in West Africa, the paper specifies a mechanism through which quorum thresholds alter the composition of decision-making bodies, the conditions under which deferral is granted, and the subsequent capacity of women's marketing groups to negotiate collective sales. The framework treats quorum not as a neutral procedural rule but as a distributive institution that interacts with gendered time constraints, mobility, and voice. A methodological design for an event-study analysis of assembly-quorum thresholds is proposed, specifying how cooperative-level fee-vote records and women's marketing participation can be linked across threshold events. The paper also reports descriptive context from the DHS Program indicator on family planning messages at community meetings and events across fifteen African countries (2021–2025), with a mean of 29.733 and a standard deviation of 17.495, which illustrates the cross-national variation in community-meeting exposure relevant to rural women's associational life. The contribution is a testable sociological account of how a procedural threshold becomes a gendered gatekeeping device, with implications for cooperative bylaw design and for the study of rural collective action.