ABSTRACT
Introduction: Social obligations have a potential to clash with circadian rhythm of an individual and this is especially likely for persons with evening chrontype. Recent research has suggested that during COVID-19 restrictions some people, especially evening types, slept better than before the pandemic. We hypothesize that this is due to increased remote work that decreases conflicts between sleep timing and working h for some people. In the current study we test a hypothesis that amount of remote work is associated with improved sleep length and quality as well as decreased social jet lag among Finnish adult population. We also expect that this association is strongest among people with evening chronotype. Method(s): The sample will consist of 3500 Finnish adults representative of general population in Finland. Data collection will take place April 2022 and will be carried out by market research company Kantar. Participants will fill in a survey investigating among other things number of workdays per week they work remotely. Questions related to sleep include self-estimated sleep length, sleep quality, MEQ chronotype questionnaire and sleep and wake times during free-and workdays. Various questions about sociodemographic background variables will also be inquired. Regression models will be used to investigate associations between amount of remote work and sleep length, sleep quality, social jet lag and chronotype. Result(s): Our hypothesis is that there is a positive association between amount of remote work and sleep length and sleep quality with remote work having negative association with social jet lag. Data collection will complete in April and preliminary results will be available by autumn 2022. Conclusion(s): Social jet lag is very prevalent among adults, and this suggest that conflicts between optimal timing and duration of sleep with social obligations such as working h are common. Increased remote work opportunities might be one way to lessen these conflicts, especially for people with evening chronotypes. This study will investigate this hypothesis in a representative sample of Finnish adults.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that the traditional “booth, ballot, and pen” model of voting, based on a specific location and physical presence, may not be feasible during a health crisis. This situation has highlighted the need to assess whether existing national electoral legislation includes enough instruments to ensure citizens’ safety during voting procedures, even under the conditions of a global pandemic. Such instruments, often grouped under the umbrella of voter facilitation or convenience voting, range from voting in advance and various forms of absentee voting (postal, online, and proxy voting) to assisted voting and voting at home and in hospitals and other healthcare institutions. While most democracies have implemented at least some form of voter facilitation, substantial cross-country differences still exist. In the push to develop pandemic-sustainable elections in different institutional and political contexts, variation in voter facilitation makes it possible to learn from country-specific experiences. As accessibility and inclusiveness are critical components of elections for ensuring political legitimacy and accountability these lessons are of utmost importance. In this study, we focus on Finland, where the Parliament decided in March 2021 to postpone for two months the municipal elections that were originally scheduled to be held on April 18. Although the decision was mostly justified by the sudden and dramatic daily increase in new COVID-19 infections, the inability to guarantee the opportunity to vote for those in quarantine was included among the likely risks. The failure to organize health-safe voting procedures to accommodate the original schedule emphasizes a certain paradox in the Finnish electoral legislation: caution in introducing new facilitation instruments has led to lower levels of preparedness and flexibility in crisis situations. Although a forerunner in implementing extensive advance voting opportunities, Finland has only recently introduced postal voting, which is restricted to voters living abroad. Hence, we ask: what can be learned from this form of convenience voting if expanded to all voters to enhance the sustainability of elections? Our analyses are based on a survey conducted among non-resident voters (n = 2,100) after the 2019 parliamentary elections in which postal voting from abroad was allowed for the first time. Our results show that whereas trust in the integrity of postal voting is quite high, various efforts needed from individual voters substantially increase the costs of postal voting. Postal operations also raise concerns. Furthermore, voters felt that requiring two witnesses made postal voting cumbersome, an issue that needs to be resolved, particularly if applying postal voting in the context of a pandemic. The Finnish case constitutes a concrete example of a situation in which voter facilitation targeted to a particular segment of society may become a testbed for electoral engineering that will improve voting opportunities for everyone. Copyright © 2021 Wass, Peltoniemi, Weide and Nemčok.