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

This paper introduces the concept of political transportation—the process through which citizens<br>cognitively simulate and imagine the political world. We propose that political transportation<br>mediates the effect of campaign messages on citizen support for political candidates. Further, the<br>degree of political transportation should depend upon which media platform a campaign message<br>is delivered through. These expectations were tested by employing an experimental design where<br>partisans were exposed to a campaign message delivered in the form of a television ad, a<br>political email, or a series of tweets. Results demonstrate the utility of the concept of political<br>transportation and show that Twitter was the least likely to lead to political transportation, while<br>there were no differences between television and email.