Margaret Levi is the Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford, Professor of Political Science, and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University. She is also Jere L. Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. She earned her BA from Bryn Mawr College in 1968 and her PhD from Harvard University in 1974, the year she joined the faculty of the University of Washington.

She is the winner of the 2019 Johan Skytte Prize. She became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 2002, a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015, the Robert Dahl Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2017, and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2018. 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, in 2017 gave the Elinor Ostrom Memorial Lecture, and in 2018 received an honorary doctorate from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. She was 2020 winner of the Falling Walls Foundation Prize for breakthrough of the year in social sciences and humanities for her work on an expanded and inclusive community of fate.

Margaret is the author or coauthor of numerous articles and seven books, including Of Rule and Revenue (University of California Press, 1988); Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (Cambridge University Press, 1997); Analytic Narratives (Princeton University Press, 1998); and Cooperation Without Trust? (Russell Sage, 2005). 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. A Moral Political Economy: Present, Past, Future (Cambridge University Press, 2021), co-authored with Federica Carugati, continues to explore how to build a better society.

She was general editor of Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics and is co-general editor of the Annual Review of Political Science. Margaret serves on the boards of the: Carlos III-Juan March Institute in Madrid; Scholar and Research Group of the World Justice Project, and the Berggruen Institute. Margaret and her husband, 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 and is traveling in the U.S. and Canada in 2017-19. Yale University Press and SAM co-published the catalogue, which is now available online. There was also a 2017 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "On Country: Australian Aboriginal Art from the the Kaplan-Levi Gift." 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, Oxford University, Bergen University, and Peking University.