The “Belgian Tetris”: Assessing the political impact of metaphors on citizens’ representations of Belgian federalism

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, the aim of this study is 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, we conducted an experiment among 493 citizens based on an article published in the newspaper Le Soir in which Belgian federalism was compared to a Tetris game in both a text and an image. The participants were distributed into four experimental conditions according to the type of input they had been exposed to (text and image, text only, image only, no input) and were asked to perform a free description task. The productions of the participants were 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. These results show that reading the text, more than looking at the image, has an impact on the representations of the citizens but that this impact is short-lived