Do sleep disruptions promote social fragmentation?

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.

Do political protests mobilize voters? Evidence from the Black Lives Matter protests

In this article, we study the local political mobilization effects of political protests in the context of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. We analyze monthly voter registration data from 2136 US counties across 32 states, leveraging variation in the exposure to BLM protests across counties in a two-way fixed-effects framework with a matched control group. In contrast to previous studies, which reported substantial mobilization effects of local protests in other contexts, we show that voter registrations in the aggregate were insensitive to the presence of local BLM protests. We further disentangle the effects along party lines and the degree to which protests were associated with violent behaviors and find similarly insignificant effects. We present some preliminary evidence that the large scale of the protests and their extensive news coverage might have reduced the importance of experiencing a protest firsthand.