The “Belgian Tetris”: assessing the political impact of metaphors on citizens’ perception of and attitude towards Belgian federalism

In the literature, the political impact of metaphors has often been taken for granted from metaphor analysis in political discourse. However, a more global understanding of what this political impact could consist of, is still lacking from the current research agenda. To be able to account for how metaphors, through discourses, actively shape the political reality, it is important to look at the relationships between metaphorical discourses and their environment. Based on the idea that metaphors do not only reflect the perceived reality, but also function as cues through which citizens come to understand complex political processes (Bougher 2012), the aim of this study is precisely to look at how specific metaphors might impact on the citizens’ framing of Belgian federalism. To measure the impact of metaphors on the citizens’ political representations and attitudes, we conducted a first experiment among 493 citizens based on an article (including a text and an image) published in the newspaper Le Soir (13-14 July 2013) in which Belgian federalism was deliberately compared to a Tetris game (AUTHORS, submitted). The participants were distributed into four experimental conditions according to the type of input they had been exposed to (respectively no input, text and image, image only, text only), and were asked to perform three interrelated tasks (a free description task, a picture association task and a questionnaire measuring their attitude towards Belgian federalism). The productions of the participants in the description task have been analyzed using keyword analyses and content analyses. The results suggest that the participants who had been exposed to the experimental text tend to differently frame their perception of Belgian federalism (among other things, by highlighting the notion of transfer of competences from the federal state to the sub-national entities). Whereas these results suggest that reading the text might have an impact on the representations of the citizens, they do not allow us to pinpoint the specific role played by the Tetris metaphor itself on these different representations. To further determine to what extent the observed influence of the text on the citizens’ representations can be attributed to the Tetris metaphor, we developed a follow-up experiment for which we produced two versions of the experimental text, namely a version in which the Tetris metaphor remained explicit and a version in which it had been left out. We conducted the experiment among 600 citizens distributed into 3 experimental conditions (respectively no input, original text, original text without explicit reference to the Tetris metaphor). They were asked to achieve the same three tasks as in the original experiment. The results are currently being analyzed and will be the main subject of our contribution. This experimental design should allow us (i) to observe the specific influence of the Tetris metaphor on the integration of textual information and (ii) to assess to what extent it shapes the citizens’ representations of Belgian federalism