John Ahlquist and Margaret Levi are authors of the book . The book is a political science investigation that examines why some organizations expand their scope of action in ways that do not benefit their members directly. The working title of the research project was Union Democracy Reexamined.

In the book, John Ahlquist and Margaret Levi systematically compare and document eighty years of union social activism by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in the United States and the Waterside Workers Federation (WWF) in Australia. They 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.

John S. Ahlquist is the Trice Family Faculty Scholar and associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He is also a research associate in political economy at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney and a faculty affiliate of the La Follette School, the Center for Financial Security, and the Institute for Research on Poverty. He holds a B.A. from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Ahlquist was project director for the Union Democracy Reexamined project while he was a graduate student at the University of Washington.

Margaret Levi is the Jere L. Bacharach Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington and Senior Fellow, Watson Institute of International Studies, Brown University. She is Foundational Chair in Politics at the University of Sydney's United States Studies Centre, where she is now an Affiliate Professor. She is also 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).