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

As metaphors not only reflect perceived reality, but can 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 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 across four experimental conditions accord... Mehr ...