Imagined Politics: How Different Media Platforms Transport Citizens Into Political Narratives

Abstract

This article examines political transportation—the construction of mental models that represent a political world and result in the absorption and positioning of oneself within the constructed world. Specifically, we propose that when citizens become immersed in the political narrative crafted by a politician, they become more likely to see the political world as personally relevant and, subsequently, become more committed to supporting that candidate. Further, the degree of political immersion should depend upon which media platform a campaign message is delivered through. These expectations were tested using an experiment where partisans were exposed to a campaign message delivered in the form of a television ad, a political e-mail, or a series of tweets. Results demonstrate that Twitter was the least likely to lead to political immersion. Further, results provide support for our theoretical model, where there is an indirect effect of campaign messages on political attitudes and behavior through immersion and perceived personal relevance. Taken together, this study demonstrates the utility of applying the concept of narrative transportation to politics.

Keywords

political transportation narrative transportation political campaigns political advertising political e-mails Twitter

Donald Trump’s 2016 political advertisement, “Two Americas,” asks viewers to imagine two wildly different election outcomes—“Hillary Clinton’s America,” where corruption, crime, and illegal immigration reign, or “Donald Trump’s America,” where Americans are safe and secure (Dumenco, 2016). The ad tells a story about what America as a nation can and should be and declares that electing the right or wrong candidate will lead to either ideal or devastating outcomes. Indeed, much of political communication is presented in a narrative format. Political narratives can be defined as stories about sociopolitical issues, which exist within an imagined community¹ where the actions of political actors and/or the outcomes of political events have important causal effects. Unsurprisingly, politicians cast themselves as protagonists capable of defeating an imminent threat. The goal of most campaign messages is to convince the populace to adopt their constructed narrative (Kreiss, 2012). This article examines whether transportation mediates the effect of campaign messages on citizen support for political candidates and the degree to which transportation depends upon which media platform a campaign message is delivered through.

In many ways, political narratives are similar to the fictional narratives found in a novel, television show, or movie (McLaughlin, Thompson, & Krause, 2017). They are dramatic plots filled with binary narratives about “good guys” and “bad guys” (Anker, 2005; Coe, Domke, Graham, John, & Pickard, 2004). Citizens, for their part, often get caught up in the drama of politics. Conflict and election-related suspense hold public interest far better than substantive discussion of political issues and policies (Iyengar, Norpth, & Han, 2004). The degree to which a citizen enjoys following politics is a crucial, but often overlooked, antecedent to political engagement (Holbert, Zeng, & Robinson, 2017). Political narratives can captivate audiences, urge citizens to imagine how the election outcome will affect them personally (Jamieson, 1996), and even encourage them to view themselves as central actors in the political narrative (McLaughlin et al., 2017).

Political narratives may come from a variety of sources (e.g., politicians, journalists), delivered through various media platforms (e.g., television, Twitter, e-mail), set in different contexts (e.g., local elections, national elections), focused on a diverse range of topics (e.g., policy debates), and utilize vastly different narrative devices (e.g., story archetypes). Each glimpse into the political world provided by such narratives contributes to a person’s idiosyncratic and overarching political narrative regarding their beliefs about past, present, and possible futures of the imagined community (e.g., the United States). Scholarship examining the process through which narratives engage and persuade audiences, such as the theory of narrative transportation, may provide crucial insights into how political narratives affect citizens’ political attitudes and behaviors. Transportation refers to the process through which “all of the person’s mental systems and capacities become focused on the events occurring in the narrative” (Green & Brock, 2002, p. 324). When citizens are transported into a story world, they become more likely to accept and internalize the beliefs and attitudes articulated in a narrative (Green, 2004).

Similarly, the more a citizen gets drawn into a publicized political narrative, the more they should accept a political narrative at face value. Transported partisans use the information provided by the narrative to create and/or update a cognitive representation (i.e., a mental model) of the political world. Recent studies have provided evidence that citizens can become immersed in political narratives (Wojcieszak & Kim, 2016) and that a citizen’s general predisposition to become transported can moderate the effect of political messages (Lee & Shin, 2014).

Scholars have yet to thoroughly conceptualize the specific process through which partisans are transported into political narratives, however. To that end, in the current study, we explicate the concept of political transportation and apply it to the context of a U.S. Senate election. Campaign messages necessarily tell a story about what will happen if one candidate or another gets elected and thus serve as prime opportunities for examining political transportation. The degree to which a citizen becomes immersed into a politician’s constructed narrative should influence their perception that the election is personally relevant to their life, which should, subsequently, affect political attitudes and behaviors. Further, some platforms used to reach voters in multimedia campaigns should lend themselves to transportation processes better than others given that medium specific features can affect how messages are processed (Sundar, 2008). Thus, the medium through which a partisan receives the political narrative should affect the degree to which they become transported. We test these expectations by employing an experimental design in which a national sample of Democrats and Republicans are presented a Senate campaign message, either in the form of a television ad, a political e-mail, or a series of tweets.

Imagination and Mental Models

At first glance, the claim that politics can be conceptualized as “imagined” may seem wrong, perhaps even offensive. To be sure, political debates are about the real-world and political decisions have real consequences. This much is obvious. Imagining a version of reality is a normal facet of everyday life, however. Imagination is a cognitive process where the mind uses previously acquired information to simulate what is or what might be (Oatley, 1995). From a very young age, people rely on imagination to learn about, and make sense of, the social world and picture what will happen if they take certain actions (Strauss, 1959).

Imagination is not delusion—it is (usually) tethered to reality. Imagination is possible because the human mind constantly gathers, stores, and organizes incoming information to create cognitive representations of the world (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). Situation models are cognitive representations of temporally and spatially bounded events, stories, and/or situations. Mental models are broader cognitive constructs, which tie together related events, stories, and/or situations. Mental models can provide seemingly coherent narratives about a world where a complex network of actors, objects, and concepts all fit neatly together (Roskos-Ewoldsen, Davies, & Roskos-Ewoldsen, 2004). Mental models are constructed in memory over time but are constantly being updated and reevaluated as people are exposed to new information or situations (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2008).

When people read or watch narratives, they create mental models that represent the story world and then cognitively simulate these narratives as if they were experiencing reality (Oatley, 1995). By mentally modeling the political world, citizens can grasp the potential causes and consequences of political events and decisions. When a citizen encounters a narrative about a U.S. Senate race (e.g., a political ad), for example, they will build a cognitive representation of the characters (e.g., the Senate candidates) and issues involved, form assessments about the politicians’ motivations, make moral evaluations, and create causal assumptions about the effects of the election outcome (e.g., how it will affect their pocketbook). The cognitive representation of this senate race could then be incorporated into a mental model about the larger political world (e.g., American politics). For example, the citizen could consider the effect of that election on the balance of power in the Senate and then project the implications this would have, in turn, on the nation as a whole.

Over time, citizens will continue to develop, adjust, and refine a mental model of the broader political world. Political mental models can be formed from information gathered from a wide variety of sources. Political communication channels are filled with an endless stream of conflicting narratives about political reality (Jungherr, Schoen, & Jurgens, 2016). By observing information disseminated through mass communication channels, people form perceptions about the attitudes, beliefs, and experiences of generalized others (e.g., politicians, partisans; Mutz, 1998). When citizens are exposed to mediated political narratives, they may construct, and simulate, a mental representation of the world described in the narrative. This representation can then be used to reaffirm or update their broader mental model about the political world.

Political Transportation

Mental models allow people to simulate and experience narratives as if they were actually a part of those constructed worlds. When people watch or read narrative, they are often transported into the story world (Green & Brock, 2000). Busselle and Bilandzic (2008) define transportation as “a flow experience in constructing the mental models of a story that is accompanied by the positioning of oneself in the story world” (p. 263). Audience members do not just observe the unfolding story as something happening to other people, they often imagine that they are in the story (Cohen, 2001). Similarly, even though political narratives are about people and events a citizen may never directly encounter, citizens may come to feel as if they were experiencing these political worlds first hand. Thus, we define political transportation as the construction of mental models that represent a political world and result in the absorption and positioning of oneself within the constructed world.

When people become transported into a story world, they typically focus on the experience, rather than concerning themselves with a critical evaluation of the attitudes or beliefs promoted by the narrative. Because narrative transportation tends to decrease counterarguing, audience members become less likely to produce negative responses to the attitudes and beliefs promoted in the narratives (Moyer-Gusé, 2008; Slater & Rouner, 2002). As such, narrative transportation can mediate the relationship between exposure to communication messages and attitude change (Green & Brock, 2000; Moyer-Gusé, 2008; Slater & Rouner, 2002).

Specifically, we expect political transportation to affect political attitudes and behaviors by first immersing citizens into the story world, which will then cause them to perceive events and outcomes within the story world as personally relevant. The more they imagine that the events articulated by a political narrative will directly affect the world they inhabit, the more passionate they should become about supporting their preferred candidate and/or political party.

Political immersion

For a political narrative to deeply affect a citizen, they must first become immersed in the story world. Immersion occurs when a person directs all their thoughts and feelings toward the unfolding plot and loses a sense of awareness of the physical world around them (Gerrig, 1993). Partisans may get caught up in developing political stories the way they would binge watch a television show. Citizens are naturally drawn to the drama and suspense inherent in political conflict and elections (Iyengar et al., 2004). For example, political junkies may watch news coverage for hours on end. Wojcieszak and Kim (2016) found that when news and commentary about controversial political issues was narrative in form citizens were more likely to become immersed into the news article, which helped facilitate greater levels of persuasion.

When audience members feel like they are directly experiencing an unfolding story, they are prone to accept and internalize the attitudes, emotions, and representations of reality offered by the narrative. Rather than engaging in a critical evaluation of information, immersed individuals tend to readily adopt the depicted attitudes and experiences as their own (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2008). Partisans can then use the provided portrayal as the basis to create a cognitive representation of the political world. That is, immersed partisans should internalize the story line, character evaluations, and causal relationships as an accurate reflection of reality.

Perception of personal relevance

To successfully persuade citizens, political narratives need to not only draw citizens in but also convince them that the events within the story world are personally relevant. Previous research has identified perception of invulnerability as a major barrier to persuasion (Moyer-Guse, 2008). If citizens cannot imagine themselves in a particular scenario, then they are unlikely to be influenced by a persuasive message. Narratives can overcome these barriers to persuasion by encouraging audience members to consider their vulnerability when deciding future behaviors.

In the context of politics, in order for citizens to care about political outcomes, they must first believe that the political world has real and important consequences. The more immersed a citizen is in the political narrative, the more they should simulate mental models about how political events will impact their life. As citizens imagine and anticipate the effect of political events and outcomes, they can come to feel as if the political outcomes are of paramount importance for their own lives, their social groups, or an imagined community to which they belong. This is particularly true in politics given politicians expend significant energy encouraging citizens to imagine how their vote can affect an election outcome and how that outcome, in turn, will affect them personally (Jamieson, 1996). Politicians often work hard to construct narratives that locate the citizen within a story world and emphasize their susceptibility to a specific threat in this world (McLaughlin et al., 2017).

Political Elections and Candidate Support

This study examines narrative transportation in the context of a U.S. Senate race. We expect that campaign messages can have an indirect effect on candidate attitudes and voting behavior through immersion and perceived personal relevance. First, we predict that the more a partisan is immersed into a political narrative espoused by a candidate, the more they should come to believe the political narrative has personal relevance. Thus, we predict:

Hypothesis 1: Immersion into a political narrative will lead to higher levels of perceived personal relevance.

Next, the more a partisan perceives that political events and outcomes are directly relevant to their life, the more likely they should be to hold favorable attitudes about the in-group candidate, and the more motivated they should be to go out and vote in order to ensure their preferred candidate is elected. Thus, we predict:

Hypothesis 2: Perceived political relevance will lead to (a) higher levels of favorability for the candidate and (b) higher likelihood of voting for the candidate.

Finally, we predict an indirect path from campaign messages, such that:

Hypothesis 3: There will be an indirect effect of a political campaign message on (a) candidate favorability and (b) voting intentions through political immersion and perceived personal relevance.

Mediated Political Worlds

The nature of political campaigning has changed substantially in the last 10–15 years. Political candidates still rely heavily on television advertisements (Ridout & Franz, 2011), but social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, have become prominent sites of political campaigning (Morris, 2017). These new media outlets provide politicians effective means of reaching potential voters (Vaccari, 2013). Despite receiving substantially less scholarly attention, political e-mails are also a central fixture in modern political campaigns (Stromer-Galley, 2014).

If political worlds are constructed and disseminated through different media platforms, then it is important to ask whether citizens process narratives differently depending upon the medium. Relatively little research has explored whether transportation is affected by the medium in which a narrative is encountered (van Laer, Ruyter, Visconti, & Wetzels, 2013). There is little doubt that medium-specific features can affect how messages are processed (Sundar, 2008), but so far scholars have not found much evidence of such differential effects on transportation (Green et al., 2008; Pincus, Wojcieszal, & Boomgarden, 2016).

What we do know is that audience members can have very different sensory experiences depending upon where they encounter a narrative. One common distinction is between the ways audience members process text versus film. On one hand, television has a unique advantage because narratives can be presented in vivid, audiovisual form, which can closely mirror the sensory experiences of the real world (Brader, 2006; Mutz, 2015). These features allow viewers to be transported with limited cognitive effort—the narrative already exists in actualized form (Green et al., 2008). We therefore expect that partisans will become more transported into the political world when they receive a campaign message through a television ad, rather than a textual source (e.g., e-mail), or more interactive social media source (e.g., Twitter). Thus, we predict:

Hypothesis 4: Political messages delivered through television will lead to greater levels of political immersion than messages delivered through e-mail or Twitter.

There is, however, an alternative perspective that argues textual narratives should encourage a higher degree of transportation. Unlike television, text requires the reader to actively use their imagination to create a mental image of the story world (Green et al., 2008). The active role readers play may facilitate transportation (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2008). Perhaps television and text have equivalent ability to transport audience members, even if they provide different paths to reach the story world (Green et al., 2008). Either way, political e-mails should be quite capable of transporting partisans. E-mails are delivered straight to supporters’ inbox, allowing them to be read with minimal concern about the perceptions of outsiders (Serazio, 2014). This extra degree of privacy may remove barriers that might otherwise disrupt the transportation process.

The political e-mail context is quite different from campaign messages disseminated through Web 2.0. Social media sites, such as Twitter, are notable for their greater affordance of interactivity and customization, providing citizens with an increased perception that they can directly interact with politicians (Lee & Shin, 2014; Stromer-Galley, 2014). While Web 2.0 may empower citizens to play a more active role in political processes (Vaccari, 2013), interactivity heuristics may prime audience members to focus on their individual agency (Sundar, 2008), rather than becoming immersed in the narrative world constructed by the politician.

Further, research suggests that the combination of visual images and text is not processed holistically, the way audiovisual information is. Online platforms that include multimodal features may distract audience members (Sundar, 2008), draining cognitive resources and reducing transportation (van Laer et al., 2013). Twitter includes a series of textual messages, which are surrounded by images and other visual elements. We therefore predict:

Hypothesis 5: Political messages delivered through Twitter will lead to lower levels of political immersion than messages delivered through television or e-mail.

Method

Sample

A total of 376 participants (M_age = 50.3, SD = 15.4; 54.7% Female, 43.2% Male; 81.5% White) were recruited through Survey Sampling International (SSI). SSI uses quota sampling to approximate a representative sample of a target population. For this study, only American citizens who self-identified as Republican or Democrat were recruited. The sample consisted of 50.2% Republicans and 49.8% Democrats that were distributed across the 50 states.

Stimulus Material

Participants randomly viewed one of the three political campaign messages for the 2016 U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania. Participants viewed ads that were congruent with their party affiliation and thus saw information about either the Republican candidate Pat Toomey or the Democratic candidate Katie McGinty. The information was formatted as a television advertisement, an e-mail from the candidate, or a series of tweets on the candidates’ Twitter profile.

Television

The television ads for Pat Toomey (31 s) and Katie McGinty (30 s) were actual ads that aired on television networks in Pennsylvania. The ads featured one advocated issue for each politician while also stating their opponents’ contrary position on the same issue. The advocated issue for Pat Toomey is to end sanctuary cities that he claims disregards immigration laws and releases violent criminals illegally. Katie McGinty’s advocated issue is civil rights for health care, living wages, and “decent benefits.” The audio from the television advertisements featured quotes from the candidates and/or a narrator outlining the contradicting positions of the candidates while images relevant to the issue were displayed.

E-Mail

The audio from the television advertisement was adapted for the e-mail stimuli. The format of the e-mails was adapted from actual e-mails from each candidate and was written from the perspective of the candidate. The e-mails for Toomey (81 words) and McGinty (97 words) were of comparable length and featured a “DONATE” button at the bottom similar to many e-mails from politicians. However, the button was inactive to keep interactivity consistent between participants.

Twitter

The Twitter stimuli were adapted from screenshots of the candidates’ Twitter homepage. The existing tweets were removed and replaced with six tweets adapted from the candidates’ respective television advertisement. Images from the television advertisements were added to the second, third, and fifth tweets corresponding with the images displayed with the information in the television advertisement. The descriptive information of the profiles were kept consistent for both candidates (e.g., the number of likes the candidate has received). The remaining aspects of the profiles (e.g., homepage and profile pictures, listed current trends, etc.) were unchanged to ensure authenticity.

Measures

Controls

Controls included the frequency of consuming political news through television (M = 5.46, SD = 2.75), e-mail (M = 3.28, SD = 2.86), and Twitter (M = 1.85, SD = 1.83; response options ranged from 0 to 7 days), party affiliation (1 = Republican, 2 = Democrat) and current state of residence (1 = Pennsylvania, 0 = other state).

Mediator measures

Table 1 displays the 8 items constituting the mediating variables (immersion and personal relevance). These items were entered into a principle components analysis with Promax rotation (κ = 4) before conducting the main analyses. Results indicated a two-factor solution according to the Kaiser criterion (1974; only two components had Eigenvalues larger than 1), scree plot, and communalities. The 5 items of personal relevance explained 62.19% of the total variance followed by the 3 items of immersion (12.72%).

Table 1.

Items for Immersion and Personal Relevance for the Television Ad.

Scale	Items
Immersion
Imm. 1	While watching, I was fully concentrated on the ad.
Imm. 2	While watching, my thoughts were only on the ad.
Imm. 3	While watching, I was hardly aware of the space around me.
Personal relevance
PR 1	I want to know who will win the election.
PR 2	I care a lot about who wins the election.
PR 3	I can imagine how the political topics discussed in the ad affect my life.
PR 4	The political topics discussed in the ad are relevant to my everyday life.
PR 5	The political ad affected me emotionally.

Note. For other conditions, “ad” was replaced with “content of the e-mail,” “e-mail,” “Twitter content,” or “tweets.”

Immersion

The extent to which participants were focused on and immersed into the television advertisement, e-mail, or tweets was measured with 3 items adapted from the Attentional Focus subscale (Narrative Engagement Scale; de Graaf, Hoeken, Sanders, & Beentjes, 2012). Responses ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree; Cronbach’s α = .80, M = 2.68, SD = 0.89).

Personal relevance

The perceived relevance of the Senate election to participants’ lives was measured using 4 items adapted from the Transportation Scale (Green & Brock, 2000). Additionally, the following item was created: “I care a lot about who wins the election” (Cronbach’s α = .87, M = 2.46, SD = 0.93).

Dependent Measures

Candidate favorability

Participants’ favorability of their respective candidate was measured with a 100-item slider where 0 represented unfavorable evaluations and 100 represented favorable evaluations (M = 73.12, SD = 25.37).

Willingness to vote

Participants’ willingness to vote for their respective candidate whether they lived in Pennsylvania was measured with a 100-item slider (M = 77.61, SD = 26.91).

Results

The SPSS Version 23 macro PROCESS (Hayes, 2013) was used to examine the current study’s hypotheses . Specifically, serial mediation analyses (10,000 bootstrap samples in Model 6) examined the influence of different media platforms on the favorability of candidates and participants’ voting intentions through immersion and, sequentially, personal relevance (see Figure 1). Predictions of serial mediation posit a causal linkage between an independent variable, two or more mediating variables, and a dependent variable. Serial mediation implies that one mediating variable (e.g., immersion) causes and occurs before a subsequent mediating variable (e.g., personal relevance) that then directly causes the dependent variable (Hayes, 2013).

In order to compare serial mediation processes across different media platforms, two dummy variables were created to represent the two condition comparisons of interest. For example, a dummy coding strategy represented the three conditions as a comparison between the television advertisement and the e-mail and another comparison between the television advertisement and the tweets. Individual analyses examined each dummy variable as a focal predictor in a serial mediation model while entering the other dummy variable as a covariate. The inclusion of the nonfocal dummy variable into each serial mediation analysis provides PROCESS the necessary information to accurately reproduce the means of all three conditions for every analysis (Hayes & Preacher, 2014). Therefore, a total of four serial mediation analyses were conducted that consisted of individual analyses of each dummy variable on each of the two dependent variables. Participants’ usage and consumption of the different media platforms (i.e., television, emails, and Twitter) were entered as covariates for each analysis along with their party affiliation (Republican = 1 and Democrat = 2) and a dichotomous variable representing whether they lived in Pennsylvania or not.

Direct Paths

Media platform to immersion

As shown in Table 2, the television advertisement increased participants’ immersion compared to the Twitter content (b = −0.40, SE = 0.11, t = −3.78, p < .001) but not e-mail (b = 0.07, SE = 0.11, t = 0.71, p = .48).

Table 2.

Serial Mediation of Immersion and Personal Relevance on Candidate Favorability and Willingness to Vote for Candidate.

	b	SE	t	LLCI	ULCI
Immersion
E-mail	0.07	0.11	0.71	−0.13	0.28
Twitter	−0.40	0.11	−3.78	−0.61	−0.19***
Personal Relevance
E-mail	−0.00	0.09	−0.04	−0.18	0.17
Twitter	−0.05	0.09	−0.56	−0.23	0.13
Immersion	0.59	0.04	13.37	0.50	0.68***
Favorability
E-mail	−0.82	2.72	−0.30	−6.16	4.52
Twitter	−5.53	2.80	−2.00	−11.02	−0.03*
Immersion	0.21	1.62	0.13	−2.97	3.39
Personal relevance	10.62	1.55	6.84	7.57	13.67***
E-mail → Immersion → Relevance	0.47	0.66	—	−0.75	1.86
Twitter → Immersion → Relevance	−2.52	0.86	—	−4.57	−1.15*
Willingness to Vote
E-mail	−1.48	2.87	−0.52	−7.13	4.17
Twitter	−7.20	2.96	−2.43	−13.03	−1.38*
Immersion	−1.00	1.71	−0.58	−4.35	2.38
Personal relevance	12.58	1.64	7.69	9.36	15.80***
E-mail → Immersion → Relevance	0.54	0.78	—	−1.00	2.19
Twitter → Immersion → Relevance	−2.92	1.00	—	−5.13	−1.34*

Note. Dummy variables: e-mail = e-mail versus television ad; Twitter = Twitter content versus television ad; LLCI = lower level confidence interval, ULCI = upper level confidence interval.

*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

Immersion to personal relevance

The results indicated that immersion was significantly related to perceived personal relevance, b = 0.59, SE = 0.04, t = 13.37, p < .001.

Personal relevance to candidate favorability

The results suggest that personal relevance was significantly related to candidate favorability, b = 10.62, SE = 1.55, t = 6.84, p < .001.

Personal relevance to willingness to vote

The results indicated that personal relevance was significantly related to willingness to vote, b = 12.58, SE = 1.64, t = 7.69, p < .001.

Indirect Paths

Candidate favorability

The results suggest the television advertisement significantly increased participants’ favorability of their party-consistent candidate compared to the Twitter content by encouraging higher levels of immersion, which led to greater perceptions that the election is personally relevant (point estimate = −2.52, SE = 0.86, 95% lower level confidence interval (LLCI) = −4.57, upper level confidence interval (ULCI) = −1.15). However, the television advertisement did not increase candidate favorability through immersion and personal relevance (point estimate = 0.47, SE = 0.66, 95% LLCI = −0.75, ULCI = 1.86) when compared to the e-mail.

Willingness to vote

The results suggest the television advertisement significantly increased participants’ willingness to vote for their party-consistent candidate compared to the Twitter content by encouraging higher levels of immersion, which led to greater perceptions that the election is personally relevant (point estimate = −2.92, SE = 0.96, 95% LLCI = −5.13, ULCI = −1.34). However, the television advertisement did not increase willingness to vote through immersion and personal relevance (point estimate = 0.54, SE = 0.78, 95% LLCI = −0.90, ULCI = 2.19) when compared to the e-mail.

To summarize, we find support for our expectations that immersion into a political narrative would lead to higher levels of perceived relevance (Hypothesis 1), that perceived political relevance would lead to higher levels of favorability for the candidate (Hypothesis 2a), and a higher likelihood of voting for the candidate (Hypothesis 2b). We also found evidence that campaign messages have an indirect effect on candidate favorability and voting intentions through political immersion and perceived personal relevance (Hypotheses 3a and 3b). Additionally, Twitter was the least likely platform to lead to immersion. We did not, however, find any differences between television ads and political e-mails. Thus, Hypothesis 5 was supported but not Hypothesis 4.

Discussion

This article proposes that applying narrative transportation to politics can help us understand how partisans experience and respond to political messages. Specifically, the current study provides evidence that when citizens become immersed in the political narrative crafted by a politician, they become more likely to see the political world as personally relevant and, subsequently, become more committed to supporting that candidate.

Political narratives are about a story world that concerns an imagined community (e.g., the United States) and where the actions of political actors and/or the outcomes of political events have important causal effects on a citizens’ life and/or on those he or she cares about. Results suggest that people’s evaluations of, and support for, politicians (in this case, a Senate candidate) may be influenced by political transportation. Furthermore, the media platform a political narrative is delivered through can play an important role in political transportation processes and their subsequent effects.

Political Transportation

People’s mental models regarding the direction and future of imagined communities (e.g., a nation) likely come from a myriad of sources including mainstream media, news correspondents, and, crucially, politicians themselves. These sources often provide people with preassembled narratives about how specific political events and politicians fit within a larger political world. These event-specific narratives assist people in making situation models that are temporally constrained to particular events but contribute to the larger, overarching narrative of the political world. The current study examined one such event-specific narrative provided by senatorial candidates in Pennsylvania in an effort to determine whether political narratives can induce transportation processes and thereby explain their effectiveness.

Previous research on narrative persuasion has demonstrated the ability of narratives to effectively deliver persuasive content due to our desire to be “swept away” by a story world. In order to facilitate transportation, people are willing to lower the cognitive mechanisms they employ when critically evaluating persuasive information. Additionally, the ease and efficiency in which people process social information within narratives facilitates the intake of persuasive content when properly integrated with the narrative (Moyer-Guse, 2008: Slater & Rouner, 2002).

Political messages often try to persuade citizens by constructing dramatic narratives about the political world. Yet, little research has examined how narrative processing contributes to the persuasiveness of such political narratives. Political scientists have long debated whether political behavior is driven by attitudes (e.g., Downs, 1957; Levendusky, 2009) or social identity commitments (e.g., Campbell, Converse, Miller, & Stokes, 1960; Iyengar, Sood, & Lelkes, 2012). The concept of political transportation views political behavior through a different lens—our concern is how partisans imagine and experience the political world. Citizens do not make political decisions simply due to an assessment of issue proximity or because of psychological commitments. Citizens imagine how political elections can change the course of America’s future and, consequently, affect their lives. When it comes to voting behavior, imagination is reality. For example, leading up to the 2016 presidential election, if a citizen could not imagine living in an America where Hillary Clinton (or Donald Trump) is president, then she or he likely cast a vote, even if they did not particularly care for Donald Trump (or Hillary Clinton). In these scenarios, citizens often imagine that they will personally be living in a world that is heavily influenced by election outcomes, even though much of what they know about this political world is learned and experienced vicariously, through mediated messages (see Bennett & Entman, 2000; Jungherr et al., 2016; Mutz, 1998). Mental models and the way citizens become transported into constructed political worlds can best explain these scenarios.

Political Transportation and Media Platforms

Our results also suggest that the media platforms through which a political narrative is delivered can influence how transported a partisan becomes. Twitter was the least likely platform to lead to political immersion, particularly compared to viewing a television ad. Contrary to expectations, however, we did not find any differences between the television ads and political e-mails. It is not particularly shocking that video and text demonstrated roughly equivalent ability to draw citizens in. The audiovisual benefits of television create a more vivid sensory experience, whereas text requires readers to actively create imagery. The relative benefits of each modality appear to lead to a similar outcome; even though the path audience members travel to reach the story world may be very different. Most likely, certain types of partisans will respond best to political messages disseminated through television, while others will be more drawn in by text (e.g., high vs. low need for cognition; Green et al., 2008).

Consistent with our expectations, Twitter was the least effective platform in facilitating political transportation. From a cognitive resources perspective, the combination of visual and textual images on Twitter may be distracting (van Laer et al., 2013). Further, interactive platforms like Twitter may prime audience members to focus on their individual agency (Sundar, 2008), thus limiting their likelihood of becoming immersed. Although social media platforms are crucial to modern campaigns (Bimber, 2014; Evans, Brown, & Wimberly, 2017; Stromer-Galley, 2014), people who use Twitter for political purposes tend to already be highly interested in politics (Bekafigo & McBride, 2013). That is, it seems unlikely that a citizen gets drawn into the political world because of messages they encounter on Twitter. Instead, Twitter may be most useful for engaging strong partisans who have already taken the plunge into the world of politics.

Of course, the same thing can be said about e-mails—only those who have expressed interest in a political candidate or party are likely to get political e-mails. Unlike Twitter, however, campaign messages delivered through e-mail are not displayed publically (Serazio, 2014), and e-mail recipients should have a greater opportunity to become immersed in this narrative. Television ads, conversely, are more public in nature and reach a broader voting audience. For this reason, television is particularly important for encouraging citizens to become transported into a candidate’s desired political reality. Indeed, the amount of money spent on television advertising is only increasing (Ridout & Franz, 2011).

Limitations

It is important to note that with Donald Trump’s election, it is possible that Twitter’s role in the political communication landscape has been fundamentally altered (Francia, 2017; Morris, 2017). Trump’s tweets often attract attention and spur interest and discussion to a degree never before achieved by politicians. President Trump frequently uses Twitter to directly express his thoughts and opinions and often directly challenges the versions of political reality disseminated by traditional news media channels. Thus, Trump has been particularly active in creating political narratives that transport his supporters into a distinct political reality. Given that this study was conducted prior to the 2016 election, it may be that we would see different results for Twitter’s ability to immerse individuals in a different post-Trump context.

Another potential limitation is that the Democratic and Republican narratives differed in important ways, including the sponsoring candidate and the issues they focused on. These different narratives reflect the reality that Democrats and Republicans tell very different stories about American politics, emphasize different issues, and employ different narrative devices (McLaughlin et al., 2017). Our goal in this study was not to compare across parties, however. Rather, we expected a similar process to occur regardless of the narrative specifics. Indeed, despite these differences, our results were not contingent upon party affiliation. That we found a similar pattern of results for Democrats and Republicans provides evidence that political transportation is a useful concept that can be applied to a wide range of political contexts. That is, even though narratives from each party are not always going to be comparable in an election campaign, our study demonstrates that regardless of party membership, the degree to which a citizen becomes transported into a politician’s constructed narrative should mediate its effects on subsequent attitudes and behaviors.

Another limitation is that participants were unable to interact with the political e-mails or candidates’ Twitter profiles despite the prevalent opportunities for interactivity with such platforms in the real world. However, as mentioned above, research suggests that simply priming perceptions of interactivity may be disrupting (Sundar, 2008) and thus, actual interaction with the content would likely lead to a complete break from transportation. Furthermore, a desire to interact with the content arguably starts with transportation.

Suggestions for Future Research

This study provides the foundation for a set of new questions about how political messages affect political attitudes and behaviors. As such, there are many potential avenues for future research to explore. Political elections are just one context to consider and the current study provides the initial step toward understanding transportation processes in broader political contexts. For example, political conflict also often centers on policy battles. In these scenarios, publics can become heavily invested in a specific issue or small set of issues. The construction of elaborate political narratives likely encourages citizens to become passionate about hot-button issues such as immigration, abortion, and gun control, which influence citizens’ voting behaviors during elections and issue referendums.

Narrative transportation may also help explain why there is so much animosity and polarization in the current political climate. Because politicians typically craft dramatic narratives about “good guys” and “bad guys” (Anker, 2005; Coe et al., 2004), partisans who become absorbed in these contentious political narratives are more likely to come to see the political world as a high stakes clash between protagonists and antagonists and, consequently, adopt more extreme attitudes and hold more disdain for the opposing side.

Alternatively, political narratives may provide potential for prosocial outcomes. Recent work has demonstrated that mediated exposure can lead to more favorable attitudes toward other social groups (e.g., immigrants; Wojcieszak & Azrout, 2016; Wojcieszak & Kim, 2016). It may be that by promoting empathy, political narratives can reduce social distance and help partisans find common ground.

Another potential line of research concerns the different factors that may moderate the degree to which a citizen becomes immersed into a political narrative. These factors could include personal predispositions such as conflict avoidance (Mutz & Reeves, 2005), need for cognition (Green et al., 2008), or the need to temporarily expand the boundaries of the self (Slater, Johnson, Cohen, Comello, & Ewoldsen, 2014), or preexisting partisan commitments and/or policy attitudes. Additionally, message-specific factors should also play an important moderating role (e.g., how the message is constructed and who delivers it). For example, when a news story comes from the political in-group, partisans should anticipate agreement, priming them to be drawn into the story. When a story comes from an out-group source, however, they should prepare to either ignore or systematically critique the story.

Narrative persuasion research has focused on the ability of narratives to change people’s preexisting attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. However, the current study was interested in transportation processes for party consistent messages that draw upon and reinforce such outcomes. Indeed, the current study argues that transportation into attitude consistent messages serves as a major driving force behind political behavior and is a tool for politicians and campaign managers to garner support and motivate their base. Political transportation highlights the duality of transportation processes that can diminish or reverse attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors but also invigorate them to achieve a particular end. Although the current study examined messages that targeted party-consistent partisans, political campaigns also construct messages aimed at changing the attitudes of undecided voters or partisans who may switch their votes. Future research should examine transportation processes in contexts in which a narrative promotes a counterattitudinal position. In particular, research should focus on the ability of political narratives to reduce counterarguing as proposed in the extended elaboration likelihood model (E-ELM) (Slater & Rouner, 2002) and the entertainment overcoming resistance model (EORM) (Moyer-Gusé, 2008), which were less applicable to the current study given the proattitudinal nature of the messages.

Finally, it is also important to note that we have proposed one way to think about and measure political transportation. Because political worlds exist in individual minds, this line of research would benefit immensely from qualitative work that asked participants to provide their own account of how they imagine the world of politics. The measures in this study cannot fully capture the rich, symbolic world that citizens actually experience.

Conclusion

This article proposes a novel way to think about how partisans experience and respond to political messages. The results of our study provide some initial evidence that transportation into political narratives mediates the effect of campaign messages on citizen support for political candidates. Further, our study demonstrates that while television ads and political e-mails have roughly equivalent abilities to facilitate immersion, Twitter appears to be at a disadvantage. Much more work is needed to explore how narrative transportation applies to politics, of course, but this study provides a foundation for considering a different process through which political communication messages can affect citizen attitudes and behavior. Further, our study demonstrates more traditional media platforms may have hold an advantage for encouraging political transportation during a time when much emphasis has been placed on emergent technologies.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note

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