Operational Ideology and Party Identification

Conventional wisdom suggests that partisanship is the “unmoved mover” in the minds of American voters. Revisionist theories hold that party updating is conditional on individual/contextual factors. By delimiting the scope conditions of the Michigan model, revisionist models do not fundamentally challenge the classic view. This paper proffers an unconditional model of party revision. We theorize that beliefs about government activism—operational ideology—are widely available and heuristically efficacious, and easily map onto party labels. Hence, operational ideology should drive party updating. Using data from seven panel studies covering 1990–2012, we demonstrate that (1) party shapes operational ideology, (2) operational ideology shapes party, (3) the ideology-to-party effects are as large as the party-to-ideology effects, and (4) neither sophistication nor education or elite polarization condition these relationships. These results push the revisionist model of party farther than it has gone before and suggest that operational ideology is a core predisposition in mass belief systems.

Oxygen Liberation from Stabilized Zirconia upon Changing DC Polarization Condition

The compositional change of stabilized zirconia upon the change of oxygen chemical potential was studied by applying DC-polarization method to a galvanic cell using stabilized zirconia as the electrolyte. The flow of excess charge observed upon the change of the DC-polarization condition was found due to the oxygen liberation from the bulk of the electrolyte. The total amount of liberated oxygen determined by the excess charge was analyzed in terms of the compositional change of the electrolyte due to the change of oxygen chemical potential profile in the electrolyte. The calculated values based on the increase or decrease of the electronic defects could not account for the experimental values. However, the ones based on the reduction of impurity oxides were in good agreement with the experimental values. Considerable amount of oxygen can be released from or absorbed into the zirconia electrolyte by the redox reaction of impurity oxide. It is noteworthy that this phenomenon may cause serious errors to the transport properties of electronic defect determined with the use of the relaxation processes.

Effect of Polarization on the Microstructure and Piezoelectric Properties of PZT-Cement Composites

Lead zirconate titanate (PZT)-Portland cement (PC) composites were produced and successfully poled at different poling field and time. The effect of polarization on the microstructure and piezoelectric properties were then investigated. It was found that, at a fixed poling field up to 2 kV/mm, the piezoelectric coefficient (d33) was found to increase with poling time. The optimum poling time was found at 45 minutes where d33 value is 42 pC/N. The optimum and most practical poling field found for the composite was at 2 kV/mm. Lower poling field would give the composite lower piezoelectricity and poling field that is too high would result to breakdown of samples. Therefore, from these results, a poling field of 2 kV/mm at 45 minutes would be the ideal polarization condition used in poling PZT-PC composites.