Although citizens are crucial for the vitality and legitimacy of federal systems, citizens have only recently emerged as a focal point of federal studies (Henderson et al., 2014; Verhaegen et al., 2021). Yet, while these citizen-based studies provide useful insights into citizens’ attitudes towards federalisation, an important issue remains unresolved: the meanings and conceptions that citizens attribute to federalism. When analysing citizens’ attitudes towards federalism, most studies tend to assume a unified understanding which glosses over the multiple and perhaps contradictory meanings which citizens associate with ‘federalism’. This is particularly true in a political environment where the notion is politicised and gives rise to competing views on state organisation. In our paper, we propose to address this gap from the bottom-up by mobilising “the social imaginary”(Taylor, 2002; Van Wessel, 2010), which assumes that citizens’ attitudes vis-à-vis political institutions are not just a matter of rational interests but are deeply intertwined with their imagined ideals of a polity, their experiences, and the unmet expectations they may have when confronting their ideal perceptions to reality. Based on a series of focus groups among Flemish citizens, and drawing on a qualitative multi-modal approach, we find that citizens perceive federalism as a source rather than a solution to conflict. Furthermore, evidence emerges that imagined solutions are linked to citizens’ ideals and grievances towards the state.