Hi Statalist Community!

I have a question that has been puzzling me for weeks... and I decided to post in here hoping that someone could kindly help me.

I am working on a project that tries to understand if popular protests in autocratic regimes are more or less effective in countries with higher levels of economic growth. I coded a variable for “regime”, for each autocratic regime, “demprotest”, a dummy for when a popular protest occurs, and “e_demotrans” a dummy that takes up 1 if there is a transition to democracy (data in the picture below). My IV would be “hec”, a dummy taking up the value of 1 if the country has high levels of economic growth.

I wanted to apply a diff-in-diff analysis to this project with my dependent variable being the democratisation variable “e_demotrans”.
My Treatment Group would be the “hec=1” countries, and my Control Group, the “hec=0” countries.

However, problems arise when I try to define my time variable… That is because each regime might have multiple protests (see picture). I was wondering if it would be possible to have post-treatment “waves”. For example, in a certain regime with multiple protests and only the last one leads to democratisation, should I assume countries have for example 5 years to democratise after a protest happens? And define my time variable as a dummy that takes up the value of 1 for the five years after a protest (“t5” in picture) until and if a democratisation occurs?


Thank you so much in advance for your help!
Catarina