Time Zones, Tiredness, and Turnout: A Natural Experiment on How Time Constraints Influence Elections

Abstract

In this article, we show that many citizens fail to vote because they are too tired. To do so, we leverage multiple approaches, including a unique natural quasi-experiment that exploits discontinuous decreases in sleep times on the eastern side of U.S. time zone boundaries. Our preferred model specification indicates that these exogenous decreases in sleep times depress county-level turnout in Congressional elections by about 2 percentage points. This effect is magnified in areas where obstacles to voting are greatest. Moreover, tiredness appears to exacerbate participatory inequality — depressing turnout in low propensity communities most — and push election outcomes towards Republicans. Supplementing this analysis, we conduct an observational study validating the direct relationship between tiredness and turnout. Our findings have important theoretical implications for the study of political participation. They suggest that many citizens hold the precursors to participation but lack the general, rather than expressly political, motivation to act on their intentions.