Leonardo Dantas

Graduate Student, Princeton Politics

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

Since his undergraduate studies, Leonardo has worked as a researcher for the Political Violence Lab, 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, Leonardo investigated whether the moral language of right-wing legislative candidates in Brazil shifted liberal when these politicians ran in less developed, left-leaning districts.

Passionate about R programming and causal inference, Leonardo is curious about text-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.