PRACTICAL REASONING SCHEMES IN TURKISH POLITICAL DISCOURSE: PRACTICAL ARGUMENTS USED BY THE MAYORAL CANDIDATES OF İSTANBUL

Year 2021, Volume: 13 Issue: 3, 801 - 826, 01.07.2021

Pınar Danış Songül Ercan

Abstract

Politics is a social domain whose practices are discursively realized. In political discourse, politicians use argumentation strategies to justify their views or refute opposing views to persuade their voters. In this social domain, politicians as political actors try to persuade the masses to whom they address in the direction of their own opinions and ideologies. Political discourse, with this aspect, is one of the areas of Critical Discourse Analysis. Political discourse which is based on the persuasion of public, politicians often use argumentation to justify their own views or refute opposing views. Therefore, political discourse is a type of argumentative text type. In this study, the argumentation strategies were investigated using Practical Reasoning Model (PRM) (Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012) to identify the practical reasoning structures used by the candidates of the Public and Nation Alliances in İstanbul before the 2019 Local Elections. To this end, the TV interviews of the two candidates were analyzed using PRM. The findings of the study show that similar claims were asserted by both alliance candidates about the local issues, projects, and voters; however, the claims of the candidates about general politics differed because the candidates are representatives of different political parties and that the claims about the election itself were asserted only by the candidate of Nation Alliance. In this respect, these findings show that ideological differences are discursively constructed in local elections, and that within the context of local elections, not only campaigns and election promises on local issues but also ideologies of the parties exhibited.

Keywords

Political Discourse, Argumentative Discourse, Practical Reasoning Model, Practical Argument, Turkish Local Elections

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