Hi everyone,
I have some questions. I have a dataset of about political parties in 30 countries and roughly 15 elections for each. I want to use mixed models (three levels: one, parties, two, country-years and three, countries) as I plan to test the effects of both party level (ideology etc.) and country-year level variables (economy etc.). My dataset is highly unbalanced as the election dates in each country is different from each other and between elections there are yearly gaps within each country. Heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation are also present. So two questions:
First, I use robust SEs and first lagged of the dependent variable on the right side (that is vote shares is my DV and I use previous vote shares as a control). Some similar papers also used lagged DV of votes, but use them in FE models. I read in a few places that using lag value of DV might lead to severe biases in mixed models. Is that correct?
Second, a reviewer recommended me to use dynamic panel model. I am not sure if it would work with such unbalanced data. Also I have no familiarity with the model itself. Is it a sound advice for my dataset?
Best