Leonardo Dantas

Leonardo Dantas is a second-year PhD student in Politics interested in polarization, electoral behavior, and partisan communication––with a focus on Brazil. He holds a MSc from Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) and a B.A. summa cum laude in Political Science and International Development Studies from UCLA, with Honors from the College of Letters and Sciences.

As part of the Political Violence Lab, Leonardo has been studying the partisan nature of media outlets' reporting on foreign affairs and its impact on readers' knowledge of world events. For this Master's thesis, he investigated whether the moral language of right-wing legislative candidates in Brazil shifted liberal when these politicians ran in less developed, left-leaning districts.

As a PhD student at Princeton, Leonardo focuses on Comparative Politics and Quantitative Methods and is a fellow of Quantitative Analysis in Political Science (QAPS). Passionate about R programming and causal inference, Leonardo is curious about text- and video-as-data approaches to examine whether partisan candidate discourse can directly influence voter behavior.

If you are a Latin American student considering applying to PhD programs in the United States, feel free to contact him at leodantas@princeton.edu.