Margaret Levi is the Jere L. Bacharach Professor of International Studies, Department of Political Science, University of Washington, Seattle. She is Director of the CHAOS (Comparative Historical Analysis of Organizations and States) Center and formerly the Harry Bridges Chair and Director, the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies. Levi earned her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College in 1968 and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1974, the year she joined the faculty of the University of Washington. She became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 2002. She was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, 2006-7 and recipient of the S. Sterling Munro Public Service Teaching Award in 2001. She served as President of the American Political Science Association (2004-5).

Levi is the author of three solely authored books, Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (1997); Of Rule and Revenue (1988); and Bureaucratic Insurgency: The Case of Police Unions (1977). She is the joint author of Analytic Narratives (1998); Cooperation Without Trust? (2005); and Democracy at Risk (2005). She is the co-editor of The Limits of Rationality (1979); Trust and Governance (1998);  Competition and Cooperation: Conversations with Nobelists about Economics and Political Science (1999), and two forthcoming books. Her current research focuses on: 1) the conditions under which people come to believe their governments are legitimate and the consequences of those beliefs for compliance and consent; and 2) how organizational  leadership and membership provokes willingness to act beyond material interest. Concurrently, she is working on a range of issues having to do with labor unions and with global justice campaigns. Some of the work builds on the WTO History Project, which she co-directed. She also continues to write on issues concerning the analytic narrative approach to the study of complex historical and comparative processes.

In 1999 she became the general editor of Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics and in 1997 the co-general editor of the Trust series for Russell Sage Foundation Press. Since 2006, she has served as the editor of the Annual Review of Political Science.  She is currently Chair of the Board of Directors of  the Center for Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford. 

With her husband, Robert D. Kaplan, she has developed a substantial collection of Australian aboriginal art, part of which is on loan to the Seattle Art Museum.

Her fellowships include the Woodrow Wilson in 1968, German Marshall in 1988-9, and the Center for Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences in 1993-1994. She has lectured and been a visiting fellow at the Australian National University, the European University Institute, the Max Planck Institute in Cologne, the Juan March Institute, the Budapest Collegium, Cardiff University, and Oxford University.