Leonardo Dantas is a first-year PhD student in Politics interested in electoral behavior and partisan communication in Latin America and Brazil. He holds a MSc from Fundação Getúlio Vargas and a B.A. in Political Science and International Development Studies from UCLA (summa cum laude, Departmental Highest Honors, and College of Letters and Sciences Honors).

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 his 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 working on text-as-data approaches to examine whether moral partisan discourse can 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.