Local elections in Turkey and communication strategy: 2019 elections in case of Istanbul

"Politics" and "communication", which are among the social sciences, have a common goal of organizing people and their relations with society. The combination of two separate disciplines, politics and communication, is undoubtedly more effective in achieving this goal. The political communication tools used in the local elections from 1950 to the present have helped the parties reach the people and connected them to them. In this study, which was conducted to examine the dimensions and effects of the use of political communication in Turkish politics, the literature was scanned to see the way the subject was handled in the literature, and qualitative research techniques and data comparison techniques were used to examine the use of political communication in the 2019 Istanbul Elections. The election strategies followed by the People's Alliance's Istanbul mayoral candidate Binali Yıldırım and the Nation's Alliance Istanbul mayor candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu since the beginning of their election campaigns, and the methods of using political communication and their effects have been examined. The official social media profiles of the candidates were examined and the posts they made and the interactions they received were evaluated. Considering the average age of Twitter platform users in Turkey, the young population is actively using this platform and Twitter is in the third place among the platforms used frequently among the social media sharing platforms, so the shares of the candidates on this platform are mostly under scrutiny. In the research, the tweets shared by the candidates and the interactions these tweets received were evaluated. As a result of the evaluations made, it has been concluded that the candidates' use of social media as a political communication tool is particularly effective on the young population who will vote for the first time.