Bøker av Margaret Levi

Margaret Levi's wide-ranging theoretical and historical study demonstrates the importance of political relative to economic factors in accounting for revenue production policies.

Economies reflect a moral and political choice, one we can make and remake. This Element makes progress toward building a new moral political economy by offering a theory of change and principles for institutional (re)design.

Students of comparative politics have long faced a vexing dilemma: how can social scientists draw, applicable principles of political order from specific historical examples? This work offers a methodological response to this important question. It bridges the gap between the game-theoretic and empirically driven approaches in political economy.

In the Interest of Others develops a new theory of organizational leadership and governance to explain why some organizations expand their scope of action in ways that do not benefit their members directly. John Ahlquist and Margaret Levi document eighty years of such activism by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in the United States and the Waterside Workers Federation in Australia. They systematically compare the ILWU and WWF to the Teamsters and the International Longshoremen's Association, two American transport industry labor unions that actively discouraged the pursuit of political causes unrelated to their own economic interests. Drawing on a wealth of original data, Ahlquist and Levi show how activist organizations can profoundly transform the views of members about their political efficacy and the collective actions they are willing to contemplate. They find that leaders who ask for support of projects without obvious material benefits must first demonstrate their ability to deliver the goods and services members expect. These leaders must also build governance institutions that coordinate expectations about their objectives and the behavior of members. In the Interest of Others reveals how activist labor unions expand the community of fate and provoke preferences that transcend the private interests of individual members. Ahlquist and Levi then extend this logic to other membership organizations, including religious groups, political parties, and the state itself.