Discourses of Democracy and Freedom in the Election Manifestos of the Political Parties in the Turkish General Elections of 2015

Abstract

This study had been focused on the democracy and freedom discourses in the election manifestos of four political parties which were entitled to be represented at Grand National Assembly of Turkey by passing the election threshold during the general elections performed in Turkey on June 7, 2015. According to the results of general election of 2015, the political parties which had passed the threshold were AKP (Justice and Development Party), CHP (Republican People's Party), MHP (Nationalist Movement Party) and HDP (Peoples' Democratic Party). In this study, it had been tried to reveal what kind of a meaning the conceptualization of democracy and freedom -which is the leading subject at the center of political discussions- gets in the discourses of the referred political parties. How freedom and democracy is being conceptualized in the election manifestos of the parties? What are the subjects associated with democracy and freedom? How the obstacles before freedom and democracy are being positioned? By what kind of arguments us and them is being created on the basis of freedom and democracy? Do the discourses of democracy and freedom encounter loss of meaning within a populist discourse? In the study, the election manifestos of political parties had been analyzed within the frame of critical discourse analysis. The critical discourse analysis, besides allowing a multidimensional understanding of generated discourses, allows performing the ideological analysis of the texts and provides significant data in the effort of explaining how the discourses are built through the ideological strategies in the texts.



Author Information
Banu Terkan, Selcuk University, Turkey

Paper Information
Conference: MediAsia2015
Stream: Political Communication and Satire

This paper is part of the MediAsia2015 Conference Proceedings (View)
Full Paper
View / Download the full paper in a new tab/window


Comments & Feedback

Place a comment using your LinkedIn profile

Comments

Share on activity feed

Powered by WP LinkPress

Share this Research

Posted by James Alexander Gordon