Sleeping giant:A research agenda for politics and chronobiology

Abstract

Sleep research presents an important frontier of discovery for political science. While sleep has largely been neglected by political scientists, human psychology is inextricably linked with sleep and so political cognition must be as well. Existing work shows that sleep is linked to political participation and ideology, and that contentious politics can disrupt sleep. I propose three directions for future research—on participatory democracy, on ideology, and on how context shapes sleep-politics links. I also note that sleep research intersects with the study of political institutions, of war and conflict, of elite decision-making, and of normative theory. In short, political scientists across subfields can and should consider whether and how sleep influences political life in their area of expertise and how to influence relevant policies. This new research agenda will enrich our theories of politics and enable us to identify pressing areas for policy interventions to revitalize our democracy.

Do sleep disruptions promote social fragmentation?

“…Related to this line of research is a body of work that relates individual chronotype—a person’s time-of-sleep preference, or where a person falls in terms of “morningness preference (early to bed, early to rise) [or] eveningness preference (late to bed, late to rise)” (Ksiazkiewicz, 2020, p. 367)—to political views (Ksiazkiewicz, 2022; Ksiazkiewicz & Erol, 2022b). For example, using seven American samples and one British sample, Ksiazkiewicz (2020) shows that morningness predicts conservatism.…”

Editor-in-Chief’s introduction to issue 41(2)

“…Among the remaining articles in this issue, two address topics related to pandemics - Lucero et al (2022) on U.S. state responses to COVID-19 and Chamberlain and Yanus (2022) on the 1918 influenza pandemic and extremism – and Ksiazkiewicz (2022) proposes a far-reaching research agenda on chronobiology and politics in the journal’s new Letter format, which is intended to bring attention to emerging scientific issues in biopolitics in about 1,000 words.…”