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20 November 2023 Do sleep disruptions promote social fragmentation?
John Holbein, Charles Crabtree
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Abstract

Sleep changes predate shifts in mood/affect, thought processing, mental and physical health, civic engagement, and contextual circumstances, among other things. Theory predicts that these changes may lead to shifts in political and social beliefs. Do sleep disruptions shape how individuals see the world, the people around them, and themselves in relation to others? In this article, we use daily survey data from the 77 waves (N ≈ 460,000) of the University of California, Los Angeles's 2019–2021 Nationscape Survey—a nationally representative political survey—to examine the effect of an exogenous short-term sleep disruption on measures of political views, polarization, and discriminatory beliefs. Using this data set, we leverage the modest sleep disruption that occurs at the start (and end) of Daylight Saving Time (DST) and employ a regression discontinuity in time design around the precise DST cutoff (which we supplement with event study models). Despite strong theoretical expectations and correlational connection between measures of sleep and many outcomes related to social fragmentation, we find that the DST change has little to no causal effect on citizens' levels of polarization or their discriminatory attitudes. These effects are precise enough to rule out small effects, robust to a host of specification checks, and consistent across potential subgroups of interest. Our work adds to a small but growing body of research on the social and political effects of sleep disruptions.

John Holbein and Charles Crabtree "Do sleep disruptions promote social fragmentation?," Politics and the Life Sciences 42(2), 205-233, (20 November 2023). https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2023.7
Published: 20 November 2023
JOURNAL ARTICLE
29 PAGES

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KEYWORDS
Daylight Saving Time
discrimination
polarization
regression discontinuity
sleep
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