Hi there!

Marcel Garz

Associate professor at Jönköping University | Interdisciplinary researcher studying questions related to media, technology, and democracy.

What I work on

Research Areas

I study the institutional and informational conditions that sustain democratic governance in an era of digital platforms, personalized information flows, and generative technologies.

News Media

How economic, institutional, and political forces affect news production and journalistic practice, and their consequences for content, public discourse, and societal outcomes.

Digital Platforms

The governance structures, policies, and algorithmic systems of digital platforms and their effects on user behavior, information flows, and the consequences of large-scale synthetic content generation.

Democratic Governance

How democratic institutions operate and adapt under changing technological and informational conditions, including the rise of generative and agentic systems.

Computational Methods

The integration of large-scale language, vision, and multimodal models into theory-driven social science research on news media, digital platforms, and democratic governance.

Peer-reviewed work

Selected Publications

A selection of peer-reviewed journal articles. For a complete list, see the publications page.

Background & interests

About

I am an associate professor at Jönköping University, Sweden, where I have been based since 2018. I received my PhD from the University of Hamburg in 2014 and previously worked as a senior researcher at Hamburg Media School.

My work combines political science, communication, and economics to study questions at the intersection of media, technology, and democracy. In both research and teaching, I draw on methods for causal inference from observational data as well as computational approaches such as deep learning, computational linguistics, and computer vision.

Current and recent grants

Externally Funded Projects

Current and recently completed research projects supported by external funding bodies. For a complete list, see the projects page.

Handelsbanken Research Foundations

2025 – 2027

Online Platforms, News Media, and Democracy

With Ferenc Szucs (Stockholm University) and Maiting Zhuang (Stockholm School of Economics)

Swedish Competition Authority

2023 – 2025

Competition, multimarket contact, and quality of local newspaper coverage

With Mart Ots (Jönköping University)

Teaching

Courses and supervision

A selection of courses I have developed and teach. For details, see the dedicated teaching page.

PhD

Methods to Analyze Text as Data

Master

Platform Economics

Work in Progress

Manuscripts under review or in preparation

A selection of ongoing projects.

Testing the Causal Impact of Social Media Reduction Around the Globe – Team Sweden

Stage 1 Registered Report, in-principle accepted at Nature. With Maria Arango-Kure, Marie Björnstjerna, Sabina Cehajic-Clancy, Rosanna Guadagno, Andreas Olsson, Tobias Otterbring, and Peter Luca Versteegen.

Left-Digit Bias in Household Inflation Expectations

With Benjamin Larin.

Political Polarization Across Media Systems

With Peter Berglez, Lea Hellmüller, and Mart Ots.

Journalistic Strategies for Navigating Platform Moderation and Social Media Visibility

With Oana Albu and Maria Arango-Kure.

Narrative Strategies in Crowdfunded Ventures

With Thomas Cyron and Norbert Steigenberger.