This presentation analyzes the tension between agency and structure in political institutions. It raises the question of whether political activists with few economic resources have any meaningful political influence (agency) within urban governing regimes (structured power) of which they ostensibly are a part given that these regimes are defined by the “systemic power” of their economic elites. To address this question, the paper develops a constructivist, interdisciplinary research model constructed around the integration of the intellectual lenses of political science, sociology, and history, to explore the interplay between structure and agency in the political evolution of urban regimes in the United States. Constructivist approaches seek to understand relationships as reflections of the interpretations of their meanings by actors within a social context, in this case the structure of regimes, while interdisciplinary studies integrate the research strategies of multiple disciplines in their analytical frameworks. In operational terms, the paper employs a “field of consciousness” approach to establish the analytical common ground necessary for the integrated study of agency and structure in urban regimes. This approach encourages researchers from different disciplines to communicate in ways that maintain disciplinary integrity while permitting the kind of cross-disciplinary interactions that make an interdisciplinary analysis possible.