The design of equipment and thermal routines for annealing glass particles

Equipment for annealing casework sized glass particles is described. Investigations were carried out using a simple muffle furnace, a temperature programmed furnace and a metal sample holder. Because they produced a uniform and reproducible thermal environment, best results were obtained from a combination of the temperature programmed furnace and the metal sample holder. Refractive index changes for window and toughened glass specimens were investigated and a simple, reproducible annealing routine for casework was devised.     

Nonparticipation as Self-Censorship: Publicly Observable Political Activity in a Polarized Opinion Climate

In a polarized opinion climate, people may refrain from participating in publicly observable political activities that make them vulnerable to scrutiny and criticism by others who hold opinions that differ from their own. We took a dispositional approach to testing this claim by determining whether people who are relatively more influenced by the climate of opinion when choosing whether or not to voice an opinion, measured with the Willingness to Self-Censor scale [Hayes et al. International Journal of Public Opinion Research 17 (2005) 298], are also relatively less likely to engage in public political activities. In a poll of residents of the United States, we found that even after controlling for interest in politics, political ideology, ideological extremity, political efficacy, attention to political news, dispositional shyness, frequency of political discussion, and demographics, dispositional self-censors reported having engaged in relatively fewer public political activities over the prior 2 years compared to those less willing to censor their own opinion expression. These results are consistent with our interpretation of political participation as a social process that is governed in part by the social psychological implications of participation to the person. At a larger theoretical level, our findings connect the literature on opinion perceptions and opinion expression with research on political participation.

Negotiating climate legislation: Policy path dependence and coalition stabilization

This article investigates the nature of policy path dependence through analysis of climate policy formation in the United States. In 2008 the US Congress attempted to pass the Lieberman–Warner bill, a comprehensive climate and energy package that would have capped greenhouse emissions and established a nationwide cap and trade program. In the same year, California successfully enacted the Global Warming Solutions Act. This article explores the circumstances of both cases and raises the question of why legislation at the state level was successful and took such a divergent form from legislation at the federal level. The divergence of these cases is used to highlight the nature of coalition formation and policy path dependence in the legislative process. Explanations of policy tend to gravitate toward either the generalizability of game theoretic approaches or the empirical depth of case studies. This article suggests a combined approach that uses case studies to analyze the positions and motivations of actors and to then model policy development over time. The approach examines policy through the formation and negotiation of policy coalitions. Drawing on the Advocacy Coalition Framework and omnibus analysis, the approach expands these coalition theories first by analysing legislative development at the interface of legislators and constituent interest groups, and second by adding temporal dimension to the analysis. The findings suggest that policy is path dependent in that it is negotiated between coalitions that in turn create stability in the policy process and insulate policy fields from external shocks. Policy path dependence suggests that theory alone is insufficient to predict policy outcomes; policy results depend strongly on prior policy efforts, historically and socially contingent coalitions, and the resulting framing of policy possibilities.