Do political metaphors really matter? Two experiments assessing the political impact of metaphors on citizens’ opinions towards Belgian federalism

For some years, a debate has been going on about the impact of metaphors on citizens’ representations of and opinions towards political issues. In a series of subsequent papers, Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2011, 2013, 2015), on the one hand, and Steen and colleagues (2014, 2015), on the other hand, disagree about the conditions under which metaphors might influence citizens’ representations of and policy solutions about crime. The former contends that different crime metaphors do lead to different policies, whereas the latter team argues that this impact might not be due to the presence of m... Mehr ...