Margaret Levi

Levi is the Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford and professor of political science, Stanford University. She succeeded Iris F. Litt as director as of March 31, 2014. She is the Jere L. Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies in the Department of Political Science of the University of Washington.

Levi was a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University for 2013–14. She held the chair in politics of United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney from 2009 to 2013. At the University of Washington she was director of the CHAOS (Comparative Historical Analysis of Organizations and States) Center. She previously served as the Harry Bridges Chair and Director of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies at the University of Washington.

Levi and her husband, attorney Robert Kaplan, are avid collectors of Australian Aboriginal art, Ancestral Modern, an exhibition drawn from their collection, was on view at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) in 2012. It afterward travelled to the Frist Center for the Arts in Nashville, the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, and the Audain Art Museum in Whistler.

Levi started The Brand Responsibility Project—a research project to document the campaign and dispute settlement between Nike, Inc. and the Central General de Trabajadores of Honduras (CGT). CGT claimed that Nike was responsible for providing terminal compensation, benefits and priority rehiring for 1,800 factory employees following the 2009 bankruptcy and closure of two Honduran factories (Hugger and VisionTex) that were part of Nike's supply chain.

She became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 2002, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015. She served as president of the American Political Science Association from 2004 to 2005. In 2014 she received the William H. Riker Prize in Political Science. She was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science as of 2017. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018. She is the 2019 winner of the Johan Skytte Prize. In 2020 her ideas on "community fate" won recognition as Falling Walls Breakthrough of the Year in Social Sciences and Humanities [1].

She is also the co-author of Analytic Narratives (Princeton University Press, 1998) Cooperation Without Trust? (Russell Sage, 2005), and Labor Standards in International Supply Chains (Edward Elgar, 2015). In the Interest of Others (Princeton, 2013), co-authored with John Ahlquist, explores how organizations provoke member willingness to act beyond material interest.

Levi's book Of Rule and Revenue (1988), a study of the institutions of state revenue production, helped pioneer rational choice approaches in comparative politics. She has since "pushed rational choice analysis into new substantive areas", for example, in examining people's acceptance of military conscription in Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (1997).

She earned her PhD from Harvard University in 1974, the year she joined the faculty of the University of Washington. In her early work, she focused on urban politics. At the University of Washington, she co-taught classes with Douglass North for several years.

Margaret Levi earned her BA from Bryn Mawr College in 1968, in political science. At Bryn Mawr, she was influenced by Alice Frey Emerson, Paul Brass and Peter Bachrach to pursue political science. In 1967, she took a class at Swarthmore College alongside fellow students Peter Katzenstein and David Laitin, who would both go on to become prominent political scientists.

Her fellowships include the Woodrow Wilson in 1968, German Marshall in 1988–1989, and the Center for Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences in 1993–1994. She has been a visiting fellow at the Australian National University, Brown University, the European University Institute, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, the Juan March institute, the Budapest Collegium, Cardiff University, the University of Oxford, Bergen University, and Peking University.

Margaret Levi (born 1947) is an American political scientist and author, noted for her work in comparative political economy, labor politics, and democratic theory, notably on the origins and effects of trustworthy government.