Margaret Levi is Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University and Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies at the University of Washington. She is the former Sara Miller McCune Director and current faculty fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS). She is Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and co-director of the Stanford Ethics, Society and Technology Hub. Winner of the 2019 Johan Skytte Prize and the 2020 Falling Walls Breakthrough, she is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Association of Political and Social Sciences. She is past president of the American Political Science Association. She has an honorary doctorate from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

Her BA is from Bryn Mawr College and her PhD from Harvard University. She held the Chair in Politics, United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, 2009-13. At the University of Washington she directed the CHAOS (Comparative Historical Analysis of Organizations and States) Center and the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies.

Levi is author or coauthor of numerous articles and books, including Of Rule and Revenue (1988); Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (1997); Analytic Narratives (1998); Cooperation Without Trust? (Russell Sage, 2005); and In the Interest of Others (2013).

She was general editor of Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics and is co-general editor of the Annual Review of Political Science. She serves on several boards and has been a visiting fellow in multiple institutes and universities globally.

Levi and her husband, Robert Kaplan, collect Australian Aboriginal art and have gifted pieces to the Seattle, Metropolitan, and Nevada Museums of Art.