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 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 and content analyses. The results suggest that the participants who had been exposed to the experimental text tended to frame their perception of Belgian federalism in different ways. They also show that reading the text had more of an impact on the representations than looking at the image, but that this impact was in both cases short-lived.