Browsing by Author "Olson, Adam"
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Confict, Consensus, and Opportunity: Congress and the Development of the American Welfare State(2017-12) Olson, AdamMy dissertation examines how public policies that do not generate strong interest group or public support develop over time. Much of the recent policy feedback literature emphasizes the importance of developing support among interest groups or creating new constituencies to support a program. Programs that develop these exogenous supports are more resistant to retrenchment and may be easier to expand while programs that do not are harder to expand and more easily retrenched. My dissertation, which is two in-depth case studies of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the federal minimum wage, finds that exogenous support is not always central to ensuring a program's long term durability. In the case of the EITC, bipartisan support for the program among members of Congress was sufficient to make the program permanent and index it to inflation. This suggests that if the right conditions are met within Congress, exogenous support is less important. In the case of the federal minimum wage, I argue that while exogenous support for the wage eventually developed, it was not strong enough to overcome the inegalitarian program design in part, because that support was partisan in nature. This suggests that generating exogenous support is not always sufficient when thinking about how to expand a program.Item Role of hybrid cluster protein 4 in anaerobic metabolism in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii(2011-09) Olson, AdamThe unicellular green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii (C. reinhardtii) has long been studied for its unique fermentation pathways and is recently being considered as a candidate organism in biofuel production. Fermentation in C. reinhardtii is facilitated by a network of three predominant pathways producing four major by products: formate, ethanol, acetate and hydrogen. Recent microarray studies have identified many previously unknown genes highly up-regulated during anaerobiosis, and new tools for the targeted gene disruption make reverse genetics possible in C. reinhardtii for the first time. For example, hybrid cluster protein 4 (HCP4) is one of the most highly up-regulated genes during anaerobiosis in C. reinhardtii, displaying a nearly 1,600 fold increase upon anoxia. Hybrid cluster proteins have long been studied for their unique spectroscopic properties, yet their biological functions remain unclear. In this study HCP4 was knocked down using artificial microRNAs, followed by extensive phenotypic analyses. This study shows that knockdown of HCP4 affects the regulation of many key fermentative genes as well as metabolic flux and nitrogen uptake.