Hegemony moments in conservative press: September 12, 2010 referendum and new constitutional law debates

Since from the constitution of the Republic, conservatism debates continue. JDP which identifies itself as conservative democratic party, came into power in 2002, then now conservatism has become popular in social sciences as a research object. This study focuses on how conservative discourse has been constructed by conservative press' columnists. While anaylsing conservative discourse, this study utilizes hegemony concept as an open-ended process in terms of Laclau and Mouffe's radicalisation of the concept hegemony of Gramsci's. Conservative hegemony is discussed as a procession and within articulation relations practice. With this aspect, the study attempts to develop an alternative perspective to conservative hegemony. The study is structured out of two fundamental moments. Firstly, September 12, 2010 Referendum is determined as a historical moment when conservative hegemony is totally established. Columnists' of Yeni Şafak and Zaman dailies has been analyzed between September 1 and September 20, 2010. As a second historical moment, new consititutional law process has been analyzed when conservative hegemony has encountered historical events. In Yeni Şafak and Zaman dailies, columns about new constitutional law process has been examined by utilizing Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory between October 20, 2011 and December 26, 2013. At the end of the study, it has emerged that Zaman Daily, which originates from a civic Islam and Yeni Şafak Daily, which comes out from political Islam tradition, considering both these dailies' columnists' columns have parallelism and consensus in terms of September 12, 2010 Referendum. In the course of new constitutional law process, that had continued for two years, it has been observed that this consensus had been started to differentiate particularly in presidential debate. In that case, conservative hegemony has been worked as an open-ended process that enables different articulation relations and demonstrated that it is not a closed and endless system as well.