Preferences for Daylight Saving Time meet fundamentals of human physiology: correlations in the 2018 Public Consultation by the European Commission

Abstract

We search for correlations in the preferences for seasonal time arrangements across different countries. With this purpose we analyze the public consultation on summertime arrangements (Daylight Saving Time) launched by the European Commission in 2018 (the largest sample size study of this kind, 4.55 million replies, median shares of population per Member State 0.366%). We also analyze the starting point of human activity in Europe from the Harmonized European Time Use Survey, also the largest scale survey to assess the budget of time in modern societies.We find that the shares of population willing to abolish the seasonal regulations of time increases with increasing latitudes and with delayed winter sunrise times. Notably the distance of the winter sunrise to the starting point of human activity plays a determining role in predicting the preferences (R2= 0.7;p= 5 × 10−5;N= 17 Member States). We provide a simple physiological rationale for this finding.Our results challenge the current prevailing point of view on clock regulations that associates them to energy saving only, and unveil the physiological roots of these regulations.