Power, Influence, and Status

OR more than a half-century now the question most often asked of colonial America is simply: Who enjoyed political power? And yet this is also a question to which there is no definitive answer, in part because discussions of political power involve important ideological commitments, but also because we are constantly changing our definitions of power and developing new techniques for manipulating what little concrete data the eighteenth century has left us. The following essay derives largely from this latter enterprise and represents an attempt to employ a new, primarily statistical approach to the distribution of power in one, and I think uniquely representative, colonial institution, the Massachusetts Assembly. Specifically, in the following pages I have attempted to build a model of the provincial legislative system that would enable one both to identify the Assembly's leaders and to define the scope as well as the source of their institutional power and influence

Physics · Political science · Power (physics · Sociology · Thermodynamics · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Historical Economic and Social Studies

• Legislative Influence

  Open Access•Katherine Meyer•Legislative Studies Quarterly•1980

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• The Evolution of American Colonial Assemblies as Legislative Organizations

  Peverill Squire•Congress & the Presidency•2005

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