Too tired to vote: a multi-national comparison of election turnout with sleep preferences and behaviors

Abstract

Receiving a healthy amount of sleep is essential to one's quality of life. Both sleep-wake timing preferences (chronotype) and sleep duration are implicated in health, academic achievement, and workplace performance. This study complements the existing sleep-politics literature by examining the associations between sleep duration, chronotype, and turnout with a representative cross-national survey dataset from nine national contexts. Our analyses demonstrate that greater sleep duration is non-linearly related to higher turnout; those who sleep too little or too much are less likely to vote. The results also show that morning chronotype is associated with higher turnout, but controlling for religiosity attenuates this relationship. We argue that healthy sleep duration and chronotype lay at the intersection of the socioeconomic and psychological resources necessary to participate in elections.