The Belgian Tetris revisited: the influence of political knowledge on the impact of metaphors

Federalism is often presented through metaphors, such as the metaphor of the family or of a – crazy – machine, but little is known about the impact of such metaphors on citizens. In the two previous editions of the Conference Belgium: The State of the Federation, we presented two experiments assessing the impact of the real-life Tetris metaphor on citizens’ representations and preferences about federalism. The two experiments, conducted on French-speaking Belgian students, was made of different groups, controlling for the presence, in a text, of a metaphor. The results showed that being exposed to the text with the Tetris metaphor does influence the participants’ representations of federalism towards a more institutional representation and above all more regional autonomy. What is even more interesting is that we could test for the interaction between political knowledge and the impact of the metaphor. These tests reveal that the respondents with a lower level of political knowledge are indeed those who are influenced by the metaphors, while the respondents with a higher level are not impacted. In order to dig further into the question of the influence of metaphors, we conducted a third experiment, this time on a representative sample of 500 Flemings and 500 Walloons. Each language group was randomly divided into four sub-groups (125 each): a control group that received no treatment, a neutral group that saw a description of Belgian federalism, a Tetris group that saw a description of Belgian federalism presented as a Tetris, and finally a Divorce group that saw a description of Belgian federalism presented as a Divorce. The aim of this experiment is to check whether these two metaphors have or not a different influence and whether this difference runs along the linguistic line