Saloni Bhogale

Welcome! My name is Saloni Bhogale, and I am pursuing an M.S. in Statistics (Applied Statistics) and a PhD in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, focusing on Comparative Politics & Political Methodology.

I study political institutions and the political economy of development in the Global South. My research focuses on understanding factors that facilitate access to justice in developing countries, and how institutional norms affect judicial institutions.

In my job market paper titled "Village Councils and Access to Justice", I study factors that can enhance legal accessibility in developing countries, particularly the dual role played by elected members of a village council in dispute resolution and legal mobilization, using original data from over four million court cases, spanning 27,000 villages. I received generous funding for this work from the National Science Foundation's Law and Science Dissertation Grant.

I employ a wide variety of methods from causal inference, and have leveraged tools from machine learning and conducted qualitative interviews to guide my work. In a contribution to political methodology, I study how flexible machine learning methods can be used for causal inference, particularly for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects.

I am affiliated with UW-Madison's Center for High Throughput Computing and leverage scientific computing to improve performance of tasks in the research pipeline.

Prior to graduate school, I spent two years as a Research Fellow at Ashoka University, where I conducted research, managed student researchers and developed software tools for researchers and journalists.

You can find a copy of my CV here. Please feel free to reach out to me!

1. Village Councils and Access to Justice.
2. Term Lengths and Legislative Performance: Evidence from two Natural Experiments.
3. Musical Chairs: The Causes and Effects of Frequent Judicial Transfers. (with Rikhil Bhavnani and Amit Jadhav)
4. Understanding heterogeneity in causal inference using Varying Coefficient Models estimated with BART. (with Sameer Deshpande)

1. Roads and Access to Justice.
2. No Free Lunch: Unintended Consequences of Legal Reforms on the Justice System.