The basic income debate in Belgium - An experimental study on the framing impact of metaphors on the opinion formation process

A revised version of this paper has been published in: "Basic Income Studies : an international journal of basic income research" - Vol. 13, no. 2, p. 1-16 https://dial.uclouvain.be/pr/boreal/object/boreal:206958 This paper focuses on a timely political issue by addressing the debate of the opportunity to implement a basic income system in a given polity. Basic income (BI) can be defined as “an income paid by a political community to all its members, on an individual basis, without means-test or compensation requirement” (Vanderborght and Van Parijs, 2005). This is an ongoing debate in Belgium, both in academia and in the public sphere. However, this debate has not yet entered the legislative process as such. This is still much more a societal issue that has not been translated into concrete policy proposals. We take advantage of this preliminary stage of the BI debate to study the influence of discursive strategies on the opinion formation process of individuals. For doing so, we ran an experiment in which some participants were stimulated with some arguments that could be used in the BI debate while others did receive either a neutral text or no text at all. We even added three groups who received a text containing one argument and a metaphor underlying this argument. Metaphors are indeed said to impact political preferences in a much more powerful way than arguments alone. The goal of our experiment is to assess the influence of arguments and metaphors on the opinion formation process. We asked participants to take position in the debate about the controversial issue of BI and analysed their written outputs to uncover whether their content was influence by the text they read right before