Metaphors, political knowledge and the basic income debate in Belgium
An experimental study of the framing impact of metaphors on political representations
The framing impact of political discourses has long been attested for. Metaphors in particular are known to ease
the understanding of complex concepts and processes. Yet, the question remains to what extent metaphors do work the same on
different recipients? Based on an experimental design, we test a potentially key moderating variable in the study of political
metaphors: political knowledge. Our experiment aims at determining the extent to which the confrontation of individuals to
arguments and metaphors impacts their preferences regarding the implementation of a basic income in Belgium. In particular, we
hypothesize that the marginal effect of metaphors as cognitive shortcuts decreases when political knowledge increases. Our
findings suggest that some metaphorical frames are more successful than others, hereby supporting the idea that the aptness of the
metaphorical frame is a key factor when conducting experiments. We conclude that political knowledge is an important variable when
analyzing the framing effect of metaphors, especially when it goes about very low or very high levels of political knowledge. The
insertion of metaphors in political discourses may easily succeed in rallying individuals behind a given cause, but this would
only work if participants have a lower knowledge of politics.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Understanding the (indirect) effect of metaphors on citizens’ preferences
- 2.1The framing impact of (political) metaphors
- 2.2Studying recipients’ characteristics: the moderating impact of political knowledge
- 3.Method: an Experiment on French-speaking Belgian Citizens
- 3.1Set up of the experiment
- 3.2Coding and measurement of the variables
- 4.Results
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References