Implementing a basic income in Belgium? An experimental study of the impact of metaphors on political preferences

The debate on the opportunity to implement a basic income in Belgium is vivid in the academic, political and civil society spheres. Scholars, politicians and citizens deliberate on its mere implementation but also on its characteristics. Based on the one hand on this analysis that there is no agreement in the basic income debate, and on the other hand on the fact that previous studies assert that metaphors may influence the way individuals consider an abstract concept, we ran an experiment among first-year bachelor students, splitting them randomly into several groups. The aim of our research is to assess the impact of a metaphor on the respondents’ preferences regarding the basic income. Accordingly, participants were shown a text on the basic income with or without a metaphor – while the control group had no text at all. Logistic and multinomial regression models help us to uncover the impact of the presence of metaphors. Preliminary results indicate that metaphors do impact the political preferences of participants. Those who read a text with a metaphor tend to disagree less with the implementation of a basic income in Belgium than participants who were not confronted with a metaphor. The reading of a text without metaphor has no impact on the positioning regarding the basic income. This demonstrates that it is indeed the metaphor that shaped the behaviour of participants in favour of the basic income. Most interestingly, it seems that the level of political knowledge of participants plays a determining role. Metaphors frame participants’ preferences conditioning a certain score on political knowledge. Participants with low levels of political knowledge are more likely to be influenced by the metaphor. These results suggest that political discourses may be critical to the framing of citizens’ political preferences.