A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ON REFERENDUM SONGS OF JUSTICE AND DEVELOPMENT PARTY AND REPUBLICAN PEOPLE’S PARTY WTHIN THE FRAME OF REFERENDUM OF CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT IN 2017

As part of their political campaigns, political parties are canvassing using multiple channels made available by media and technology in order to reach out to the voters and to communicate their political ideologies to the people. Commonly used as a way to improve the voter base and to communicate the image of the party to the voters, campaign songs make up an important background for the campaign of political parties. Through discourse analysis method, this study analyzed the campaign songs used by the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) as the government and Republican People's Party (CHP) as the opposition in their campaigns before the Turkish Constitutional Referendum, 2017. It is seen that present political, sociological and economic structure of the society have been taken into consideration in songs which were prepared for the referendum, and campaign songs are undergirded with lingual and visual messages by both ruling and opposition parties in order to reach out to voters. The results of this study showed that AK Party, instead of showcasing its political background and using religious motives, preferred to communicate a holistic image; while CHP preferred using religious elements as a part of its political stance and strategy in their campaign songs