Rural Interdisciplinary Sociology of Chieftaincy Succession Dispute Adjudication Forums and Widow Guardianship Retention in Ghanaian Customary Courts: An Instrumental-Variable Analysis of Docket Assignment

The unresolved problem is that docket assignment is endogenous: cases involving widows with contested guardianship are more likely to be routed to forums with particular procedural characteristics, so naive comparisons of retention outcomes across forums confound forum effects with case selection. Because the analysis is methodological and theoretical, no observational data are used or claimed. Instead, the paper characterises the operating characteristics of a before-after-control-impact design under a declared variance structure with an intraclass correlation of 0.64, a between-cluster standard deviation of 6.0 and a residual standard deviation of 4.5. Power was estimated across 2000 design cells for cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points. The design achieves 80 per cent power at 54 clusters for a 5-percentage-point effect. Docket assignment is not a nuisance to be controlled but a sociological mechanism that must be theorised, and it derives the boundary conditions under which the instrumental-variable strategy is credible. The contribution is a disciplined articulation of how customary court organisation can be exploited for causal inference without misrepresenting the social life of the docket.