Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Preface
- GOVERNMENT SURVIVAL IN PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACIES
- 1 Introduction: the government survival debates
- 2 The quantitative study of government survival
- 3 Basic attributes and government survival
- 4 The role of ideology
- 5 Economic conditions and government survival
- 6 The underlying trend in government survival
- 7 Model adequacy
- 8 Conclusion: an alternative perspective on government survival
- Appendix: a codebook of variables used in this study
- Notes
- References
- Index
7 - Model adequacy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Preface
- GOVERNMENT SURVIVAL IN PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACIES
- 1 Introduction: the government survival debates
- 2 The quantitative study of government survival
- 3 Basic attributes and government survival
- 4 The role of ideology
- 5 Economic conditions and government survival
- 6 The underlying trend in government survival
- 7 Model adequacy
- 8 Conclusion: an alternative perspective on government survival
- Appendix: a codebook of variables used in this study
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
The preceding chapters have elaborated a model of government survival in West European parliamentary democracies that is at odds with much previous theorizing and empirical work on the topic. In Chapter 8, I shall have much to say about these differences and their import for the development of our understanding of government functioning and survival. Before we can turn to that matter, however, it is necessary to deal with a prior issue: how much confidence can we have in the model advanced here?
The question of confidence involves several issues. First, the model was developed on the basis of certain definitional decisions concerning what constitutes a government termination, which terminations are artificial and merit censoring, and what degree of commitment to a government can be taken to constitute membership in it. Given the central and potentially controversial nature of these choices, the extent to which the results reported in Chapters 3 to 6 depend on them needs to be explored.
Apart from the model's robustness with respect to definitions, we must also consider the adequacy of the model's specification. In Chapter 2, I noted that the absense of a measure of explained variance in event history methodology is both a frustration and a blessing: although we cannot know how much of the dependent variable has been explained by the covariates, we avoid the pitfall of assuming that a high R2 reflects a correctly specified model.
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- Information
- Government Survival in Parliamentary Democracies , pp. 115 - 133Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995