Duration Models in Politics

Duration models — also called event history or survival models — analyze the time until a political event occurs: how long a cabinet lasts before it falls, how long a war runs before it ends, how long a policy takes to be adopted, or how long a regime survives. Rather than asking only whether an event happens, these models ask when, modeling the hazard rate as a function of covariates while correctly handling censored cases that have not yet experienced the event. The Cox proportional hazards model and parametric alternatives such as the Weibull, popularized in political science by Box-Steffensmeier and Jones, form the core toolkit.