st: Survival data - stset problem

[<Stefan.Gawrich@hlpug.hessen.de>]

Dear Johan,

length of election period is an issue in this calculation. 
If you have the length of the election period you can turn the proportional time-var into an absolute time var. 

Perhaps you can take the length of the election period from the start and end dates of governments that didn't fail
(Assuming that election periods remain constant over time in one country).
That's the easy part.


Time to the next election seems to be quite of importance for government action so it might influence the failure risk years before the election period ends. So you probably have time-independent risk factors (political events, affairs), time-dependent risk factors from the start (wear, growing animosities in a coalition) and time-dependent risk factors towards the end (tactical behavior of reelection favourite, ending of a stalemate situation). 


So if one election period is four and another is five years it's probably not done only by censoring at four years.


Stefan

***********


Dear Stata-users,

I have question regarding how to set up failure-time data in Stata.
In my dataset (an unbalanced  panel of data on governments  from 1945-2009) I have a proportional time-variable, i.e. the relative duration time measuring if government cabinets survives a whole term for which is elected, where 1 indicates that is stays in power for a whole term and e.g. 0.5 the cabinet dissolves after half a term. It is possible to use such a variable for setting up failure-time data in Stata?

I also have the start date and end date of cabinets, but since the time-variable above also contains qualitative judgements (of experts) what constitutes an failure, e.g.  as some countries does not have fixed terms, it would be appropriate to use the relative duration variable described above.

Thanks,
Johan Hellström





*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/