Welcome! My name is Saloni Bhogale, and I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science specializing in comparative politics and political methodology, and have completed an M.S. in Statistics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. My work leverages methods from causal inference to study political institutions and political economy in the developing world, with a focus on access to justice.

Access to justice is central to maintaining the rule of law, however, citizens in large parts of the world face injustice that threatens peace and increases conflict. I investigate issues that restrict access to justice through two distinct lines of inquiry. First, I approach solutions from the supply side through research that helps us understand how institutions can reform and strengthen the machinery to administer justice. Second, I address questions from the demand side, studying local-level interventions that facilitate the public’s use of formal legal systems.

In my job market paper Politicians Help Citizens Access Justice: Evidence from India, I argue that village-level politicians help citizens overcome constraints to access the formal legal system. I show this by conducting interviews and using a novel empirical strategy as applied to big data: I leverage a regression discontinuity design that adds additional politicians at population-based cutoffs and assemble an original dataset of 3.8 million court cases filed by litigants from 27,000 village councils.

Legal interventions can have vastly different outcomes for different groups of people, and I contribute to work in political methodology that can help us better understand this variation by demonstrating whether and how Bayesian tree-ensembles can be used to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects.

My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation’s Law and Science Dissertation Grant, APSA’s Early Career Experimental Fellowship; and the Scott Kloeck-Jenson Fellowship, the Elections Research Center and the Institute for Regional and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I am affiliated with UW-Madison’s Center for High Throughput Computing and frequently leverage scientific computing to improve performance of tasks in the research pipeline.

To get in touch with me, please email at bhogale@wisc.edu