Professional Bio

Suzanna Linn is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Penn State University and member of the Graduate Faculty for the Program in Social Data Analytics. Her research focuses on innovations in time series analysis and public opinion dynamics. She is a Fellow of the Society for Political Methodology and former president of the Society.

Linn develops innovative approaches for handling uncertainty in dynamic modeling. Her forthcoming textbook, A Practical Guide to Time Series Analysis (Cambridge University Press), provides researchers with practical guidance for navigating the challenges of applied time series analysis, emphasizing the uncertain nature of dynamic model specification. Linn's recent work includes developing bounds approaches to inference that incorporate uncertainty in time series classification into hypothesis testing. She also conducts large-scale computational research examining sentiment, topic focus, and salience of millions of tweets about the economy (2012-2023) as a function of economic indicators, announcements, and events, comparing these digital expressions with traditional survey measures. This work reveals how digital discourse differs from survey responses, with important implications for understanding public opinion formation and economic perceptions in an increasingly connected world where many citizens form opinions based on what they observe in social media.

Her scholarship has garnered over 4,900 citations (h-index: 25), and she currently serves as Associate Editor for Political Analysis, the discipline's premier methodological journal. Linn's work appears in leading outlets including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis, Statistics in Medicine, and the Journal of Politics. Her book The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence (Cambridge University Press, 2008, with Frank Baumgartner and Amber E. Boydstun) was awarded the Gladys M. Kammerer Award by the American Political Science Association.