Remember that for much of American colonial history various issues were used as figleafs, essentially, in order for colonists to assert their autonomy.

My own background is in colonial New England. There, during the 17th century, various Puritan corporations established their own laws and systems of self-governance with only the most ostensible deference to the Crown. Winthrop's repeated violations of the Massachusetts Bay Charter, the episode of the regicide judges in New Haven (and elsewhere) and the open defiance of royal commands all were moments where the tail, in effect, wagged itself for some time. Now, this opposition was both political and religious - the Puritans in New England didn't separate the two very well, and didn't think you should, except for Roger Williams, which, let's not go into all that - but it would inspire further generations of colonial Americans. The Puritan emphasis on education and their congenital habit of pamphleteering created a society that read often and argued well. This society was separated by great geographic distance and significant cultural barriers from mainland England. (While every Puritan initially claimed to be an Anglican, in truth, the Puritans in America enjoyed significantly more latitude in expressing religious heterodoxy than their mainland English cousins.) Moreover, the royal effort to reassert and "re-Anglicize" New England during the late 17th century and into the 18th became increasingly heavy-handed and ham-fisted. Perry Miller's work, while dated, is a great introduction to the field. A volume of Winthrop's papers has been published and is well annotated.

All of these conditions coalesced- along with a huge number of other factors I have had to leave out- into a slowly growing consensus of vague opposition to the Crown.

The Mid-Atlantic also was similarly situated for different reasons. Philadelphia had, through the influence of its Quaker founders and the growing multiculturalism engendered by commercial trade, become something of an American Amsterdam. Its access to various markets inland and via the Delaware into the Atlantic meant it became a popular trading hub, necessitating the propagation of detailed market reports in the form of informal and formalized newspapers. Other presses covered international and domestic news as well as more practical things like the weather and primitive forecasting. While merchants were split between anti-revolutionary conservatives (many of them also pacifist Quakers) and pro-revolutionary people (many of them artisans), some argue that market pressures favored less regulation and thus spurred on anti-royalist sentiment. Eric Foner is a historian who has some great stuff on this in his book on Tom Paine.

I am less qualified to speak about colonial governance in the South. Nevertheless, there too plantation culture generated a wealthy, well-educated class that posed a threat to the Crown for different reasons. America's strange institution of slavery was even then differentiating it from mainland England. I can't go into this much further though, I am not qualified.

With so many disparate parties there were few coherent universal goals of the revolutionary faction. The prospect of parliamentary representation was merely one of many elaborated concerns in the Declaration of Independence, which appealed to lofty, mythic notions of a free ancestral England and the ancient liberties of the English people. (All bullshit earnestly believed by many at the time.) Legal abuses, censorship, taxation, faith, and other issues - like representation - all figured into colonist's opinions of revolution and union. The issue is more complicated than your question allows for.

Sources:

Haskins, George L. Law and Authority in Early Massachusetts. New York: the Macmillan Company, 1960. Print. Haskins is the authority on Massachusetts colonial law. His work is fair to the Puritans, giving them space to make their own arguments about liberty and government, but it is also appropriately condemnatory of their sometimes barbaric practices. Haskins suffers somewhat from his training as a historian in his style of writing, but this is a secondary concern.

Miller, Perry, and Thomas H. Johnson. The Puritans. New York: American Book Company, 1938. Print. All study of the New England Puritans consists of a series of footnotes to Perry Miller. His work was so influential that it remains the starting point for any serious student of the period.

Winthrop, John. The Journal of John Winthrop. Ed. Richard Dunn, Laetitia Yeandle, and James Savage. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Print. I confess, with Winthrop, to know the man is to like him, and reading his journal- written half as a historical record, and half as a place for him to defend his own actions in the colony- is the closest one gets to knowing him. The journal must be supplemented, however, by other sources, as Winthrop cannot resist occasionally leaving out details that paint him or his allies in a bad light.

Foner, Eric. Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. Oxford University Press, 2005. I last read Foner in college, which was about five years ago now, but he's quite good. There's another source on mid-atlantic commercial history that I love, but can't remember right now. I'll edit if I do remember it.

Doerflinger, Thomas M. A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise. UNC Press Books, 2001. I cannot recommend this book enough if you want to understand Mid-Atlantic commercial trade and culture. Capacious and thought-provoking.