Rhetorical Activism in Politics: Stability Discourse and Pragmatic Practicality in Times of Crisis

Abstract

This article aims to investigate how successfully the dichotomy between stability and crisis is used as a medium of effective political activism and power in a critical election. The main question of the article is how the parties took advantage of the political climate in their political rhetoric to activate the mental cognitions of the majority at a time when Turkey was struggling with internal and external problems. In the framework of the research question, it is analyzed whether the parties, which were represented in the Turkish Parliament, utilized the dichotomy between stability and crisis in the context of pragmatic practicality or were lost obsessively in the normative, theoretically inductive long term ideals such as democracy, human rights and gender equality. In this context the term ‘rhetorical activism’ is associated to the term ‘pragmatic practicality’. The principal objective of the article is to help increase consciousness of how the political rhetoric of the ruling party AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi/Justice and Development Party) comprising the catchword “stability” contributed to the domination of the mental cognitions of the electorates, and so increased its votes by 10% in five months in November 1, 2015 elections.

Keywords

• Rhetorical activism,crisis,stability,pragmatic practicality,idealism

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