The Case for Metaphor in Political Reasoning and Cognition

Abstract

Metaphor is a central component of human cognition. Research on metaphor's role in politics has thus far focused predominately on metaphors used by the political elite. While these metaphors are important, they provide limited insight on metaphor's capacity as a reasoning tool for citizens. Metaphor as a cognitive mechanism enables citizens to make sense of the political world by drawing from previous knowledge and experience in nonpolitical domains. Because metaphors shape and constrain understanding by framing it within existing knowledge structures, they generate important predispositions. As a result, the study of metaphor offers an opportunity to enrich our descriptive understanding of the political cognition of citizens. The implicit nature of metaphorical reasoning means that empirical investigation will be a challenge for future research, but previous studies on metaphor suggest some productive avenues. Metaphor offers not only the chance to better explain how citizens view the political world and why they hold the preferences they do, but its criteria and processes hold wider relevance for political psychology and public opinion research.KEY WORDS: metaphorical reasoning, voter cognition, implicit cognition, discourse, analogy, metaphor How do citizens make political decisions and why do they hold the preferences they do? These are fundamental questions in the field of political psychology. Citizens are a particularly interesting focal point in research because they can vary widely in how much they know or even care about politics. While a full review is outside the scope of this article, it is commonly recognized that citizens often rely on cognitive heuristics (or shortcuts) to guide their political decisions (e.g., Sniderman, Brody, & Tetlock, 1991). Using what Popkin (1991) aptly termed "low-information rationality," citizens navigate the political domain by drawing from simplified "information shortcuts and rules of thumbs" (p. 7) to substitute for full information. More than anything, research on heuristics has enriched the field's descriptive understanding of how citizens actually make political decisions (see, e.g., Lau & Redlawsk, 2006;Lupia, McCubbins, & Popkin, 2000).It is argued in this article that metaphor is a heuristic device that merits greater attention in future research. How citizens make decisions depends in no small part on how they come to understand the political world. Metaphors shape and constrain understanding by framing it within previous knowledge structures. Research has not fully explored metaphor's capacity as a reasoning tool for citizens. Instead, this capacity has been understated by a disproportionate focus on metaphors found in elite discourse. As will be reviewed, the study of metaphor in political cognition offers the opportunity to better understand how citizens view and interpret the political world. This study requires a move away from elite discourse as the primary source of data, and the implicit nature of metaphorical reasoning requires methods that extend bey...

The Effects of Metaphorical Framing on Political Persuasion: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Metaphors can explain a particular policy stance, persuade people toward a certain viewpoint, and affect people's opinion about policy issues (Bougher, 2012;Ottati et al, 2014). Metaphors were shown to help people to understand everyday issues and thereby affect people's choices about how to resolve given dilemmas (Robins & Mayer, 2000).…”

“…Metaphors are often used to frame political issues (Mio, 1997), and these metaphorical frames are argued to affect how people reason on these issues (Bougher, 2012;Mio, 1997). For example, when the metaphor a natural disaster is used to refer to immigration, elements from the source domain of "disaster" are mapped onto the target domain of "immigration," providing a negative image of immigration (Charteris-Black, 2006).…”

Recategorizing political frames: a systematic review of metaphorical framing in experiments on political communication

“…We argue that metaphors can both be used to boost frame salience by eliciting certain thoughts and feelings (e.g. Bougher, 2012;De Landtsheer, De Vries, & Vertessen, 2008;Hartman, 2012), and to boost frame importance by rendering the complexities of politics in comprehensible narratives (Kalmoe, 2014;Lau & Schlesinger, 2005). We thus propose that -all other things being equal -metaphorical frames increase frame salience and increase frame importance compared to non-metaphorical frames.…”

“…Metaphor can serve to name in language, frame in thought, and change perspectives in communication, meaning that metaphor possesses linguistic, conceptual, and communicative properties and functions. Social scientists have paid the most attention to the third dimension of metaphor by exploring how politicians use metaphor as a rhetorical device to achieve strategic goals (Bougher, 2012).…”

Special issue on the political impact of metaphors

“…Accordingly, scholars in linguistics and political researchers have moved towards investigating the use and especially the identification of metaphors in various political domains (for an overview, see Bougher, 2012). For instance, Lakoff (1996Lakoff ( , 2004Lakoff ( , 2008 has offered various accounts of American politics in terms of conceptual metaphors; Musolff (2004) and his colleagues (Musolff, Schaeffner, & Townson, 1996) have explored how we conceive and thus speak not just about Europe, but also about the Holocaust (2010); in metaphorical terms, Beer and De Landtsheer (2004) have looked at metaphors in international relations; Charteris-Black (2004, 2011) and L'Hôte (2010 have analysed speeches by major British and American politicians and their persuasive power; Perrez and Reuchamps (2012) have captured metaphors of federalism and how citizens use them in daily language, while Goatly (2007) has demonstrated how metaphors can construct myths and shape ideologies.…”