Recent scholarship has argued that institutions are the result of particular types of interaction, messages, and message flows. This study reports on an analysis explicating measures for the assessment of the endurance, reach, encumbency, and intentionality of institutional messages using an investigation of two federal policy committees as a case study. The study also investigates whether the institutional arrangements present in these committees manifest consistent participation across their diverse membership. A mixed-methods design is used to operationalize measures of force at four levels of analysis. We combine discourse analysis with quantitative measures to analyze 136 meeting transcripts (n = 136) containing 46,562 utterances over a 6-year period. Results provide ample support for the measurement and use of the concept of institutional force. Proposed measures responded well to changes in the level of analysis and unit of analysis. Results also show that the breadth of civic engagement varied substantially. This work vignettes the civic impact of institutional forces and the role that communication research can play in measuring institutional forces through organizational discourse.