Proceedings of the 16th International Academic Conference, Amsterdam

AN ANALYSIS OF TWITTER MESSAGES SHARED BY TURKISH PARLIAMENTARIANS IN TERMS OF DEMOCRATIC CULTURE

ABDULKADIR GÖLCÜ, ŞÜKRÜ BALCI

Abstract:

Parliamentarians are one of the most important persons for the healthy running and well-being of democratic system. Democratic system naturally demands different points of views and it is nourished by political and cultural tolerance, pluralism and respect. For this reason, parliamentarians work as important actors in promoting democratic values and culture, especially, by representing different political perceptions, they make valuable contributions to modern democracies. With the participation of communication technologies and social media to political life, parliamentarians have become more visible and attainable to public opinions. Particularly, their intense usage of social media for reaching these public opinions turns social networking sites into an Agora which was a central spot in ancient Greek city-states and the center of spiritual and political life of the city. At this point, content of the messages written by parliamentarians become so important for formation of democratic values and culture among people fallowing parliamentarians on social media environments. At that point, this study aims to analyze Twitter messages shared by Turkish parliamentarians during the voting process of Domestic Safety Packet in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey whether they promote democratic culture or not. 30 parliamentarians from different political parties were selected as sampling among 550 Turkish parliamentarians because of their intense usage of Twitter. As for the analysis of the messages, discourse analyze method of Teun Van Dijk will be used.

Keywords: Democratic Culture, Parliamentarians, Twitter, Discourse Analyze.

DOI: 10.20472/IAC.2015.016.034

PDF: Download