Biography for Amy Bridges

Amy Bridges is a scholar of politics and history. Her first book was A City in the Republic, Antebellum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1984). In A City in the Republic Bridges demonstrated that the central elements of machine politics, long associated with the late nineteenth century, were in place before the Civil War. A "new institutionalist" before the phrase was coined, Bridges traced the origins of our peculiar urban institution not to political culture or immigrant presence, but to early widespread suffrage. A related article, "Rethinking the Origins of Machine Politics," (in Mollenkopf, Power, Culture, and Place [1988]) showed that in the few places in England with comparably broad suffrage, similar political institutions were found.

Bridges' second book is Morning Glories, Municipal Reform in the Southwest (Princeton, 1997), a political history of seven large southwestern cities from 1900 to 1990. Here Bridges has shown that although political scientists and historians have agreed that municipal reformers were most successful in the suburbs, reformers in fact enjoyed their greatest triumphs in the governance of the largest cities of the southwest. This book was honored by the American Political Science Association as the best book about city politics published in 1997, and by the Urban History Association as the best book in North American Urban History published in 1997.

Among her published essays, Bridges has written an article about political culture, "Creating Cultures of Reform" (Studies in American Political Development, Spring 1994), reviewing the several understandings of political culture in the literature and proposing an understanding joining rhetoric, political practice, and the "tool kit" conceptualization of Ann Swidler. Another essay, co-authored with Richard Kronick explains why some cities adopted municipal reform and others did not, “Writing the Rules to Win the Game: the Political Regimes of Municipal Reformers” (Urban Affairs Review 5/1999).

For Bridges, one lesson of research on southwestern cities was that much of what we think of as "American" history or politics is really only about the Northeast and Midwest. This is surely true, in her view, of the Progressive era (1890-1920). Persuaded that the accepted story is not our (western) story, Bridges is currently conducting research on the western states in those years.

Bridges attended the University of Chicago for her undergraduate education (B.A. 1970) and, after travelling to London School of Economics for her masters degree (Political Sociology, 1971) and teaching at City University of New York, returned for her doctorate (1980, Political Science). Bridges taught for eight years at Harvard and a year at Stanford before joining the faculty of the University of California, San Diego in 1988. At UCSD Bridges is Professor of Political Science and Adjunct Professor of History.