Margaret Levi

Margaret Levi, Ph.D., is the Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), professor of political science, and senior fellow of the Woods Institute for the Environment. She is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. She served as president of the American Political Science Association from 2004- 2005. In 2014, she received the William H. Riker Prize in Political Science, and in 2017 she presented the Elinor Ostrom Memorial Lecture.

She earned her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College and her Ph.D. from Harvard University, the year she joined the faculty of the University of Washington. From 1996-2000 she held the Harry Bridges Chair and was Director of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies. She founded and directed the CHAOS (Comparative Historical Analysis of Organizations and States) Center. She co-jointly held the Jere L. Bacharach chair at the UW and the chair in politics, United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, 2009-13. She has been a visitor at multiple universities worldwide.

Levi is the author or coauthor of numerous articles and seven books. In the Interest of Others (Princeton, 2013), co-authored with John Ahlquist, explores how organizations provoke member willingness to act beyond material interest. In other work, she investigates the conditions under which people come to believe their governments are legitimate and the consequences of those beliefs for compliance, consent, and the rule of law. In 2015, she published the co-authored “Labor Standards in International Supply Chains” (Edward Elgar).