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The New York State Legislature

A Developmental Perspective: 1777–1846

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

L. Ray Gunn
L. Ray Gunn*
Affiliation:
University of Utah
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Extract

Given the centrality of legislatures in our representative system of government, it is a remarkable fact that there is today no general, systematic history of state legislative development in America. There are numerous studies of particular laws or individual legislators, but the process by which this important institution evolved historically and its role in the political system remain largely unexplored. The internal development of state legislatures in the century or so after the Revolution, as Ronald Formisano (1974: 480) has observed, is “generally almost terra incognita to historians” (see also Zemsky, 1973; Bogue, 1974; Campbell, 1976). The men who served as legislators in this period are equally obscure. Historians have also assumed, without investigating the proposition, that policy making was the primary function of legislatures and that citizens were linked to that policy-making process through representatives. Studies of past legislative behavior have focused principally on the role of political parties and interest groups in the conversion of constituent demands into public policy.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , Summer 1980, pp. 267 - 294
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1980

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