Public Sphere - Political Advertisement Relationship in Turkey: Analysing Political Advertisements of JDP in General Elections 2011

Public sphere is a social space, open to active individual access and free discussion, rescued from state intervention, where communicative action free from violence and individual benefits is undertaken; and rational-critical discourse is built. Political advertisement is the type advertising which aims at directing voters or the government to a particular action, having them adopt a certain view or approach. The concept of political advertising emerged with the practice of using commercial advertising techniques to promote a party, candidate or an idea. Justice and Development Party (JDP), has been ruling Turkey since 2002. The leader of the party is Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. It is a conservative party and has carried out some practices that could be regarded as negative. Anti-secular attitudes are also among these practices. Thus, analysing the political advertisements of JDP has proved to be interesting. Public sphere studies are mostly conducted through news stories and columns in media. In that sense, it is significant to analyse political advertisements in terms of public sphere. In this study, the political advertisements of the ruling Justice and Development Party (JDP) in the process of Turkish General Parliamentary Election, 2011 have been analysed. The political advertisements in question have been analysed via Sabah newspaper. The reason for choosing Sabah is that it supports JDP as an example of partisan press. The samples have been taken from 2 weeks before the elections. Accordingly, as a full-page advertisement is published every day, 14 political advertisement analyses have been conducted in total. Political advertisements have been analysed using qualitative text analysis. As the study follows the path of public place-political advertising relationship, it finds meaning in itself.