Politik pazarlama ve ABD Cumhurbaşkanlığı kampanya stratejileri: Donald Trump ve Hillary Clinton'ın Twitter söylemlerinin fonksiyonel ve retorik analizi

Elections are considered among the most critical events in a national calendar. Twitter, as a cost-effective and rapid means of dissemination of information, has led to a loss of dominance of legacy media on public opinion and plays a pivotal role in electoral campaigns during which political elites increasingly use the platform as a channel for political marketing that has the potential to be a game-changer, to reshape political campaigns, and to impact the outcome of national elections. This trend has been quite apparent in the 2016 presidential election campaign. Thus, considering this trend, the aim of this thesis is to analyze official Twitter posts of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential general election campaign using William Benoit's functional theory of political campaign discourse, Benoit's image repair theory, and Aristotle's rhetoric theory in order to examine the use of traditional political campaign strategies on Twitter platform. This thesis fills a gap and extends the literature because there is no study combined the stated theories to apply them to Twitter posts of political candidates. In the analysis part of the thesis, a content analysis of 1776 Twitter posts of the candidates since the first presidential debate (Sept. 26, 2016) leading up to the Election Day (Nov. 8, 2016) was conducted. The results revealed that; consistent with the functional theory's predictions, candidates employed acclaims (positive tone) more frequently than attacks (negative tone), while defenses (refutation) were rare. Trump attacked more, and acclaimed less than Clinton. However, candidates were found to place much more emphasis on character than policy in their Twitter posts. Trump discussed policy more and character less than Clinton. He also attacked more on policy and less on character compared with Clinton. In addition, candidates similarly tended to promote their campaigns through nonfunctional themes. Furthermore, an investigation of image repair strategies used by Trump and Clinton revealed that the candidates neither apologized for their wrongful acts nor introduced a plan to solve the problems concerned with the acts. Besides using simple denial strategy, candidates often sought to diminish the offensiveness of their wrongful acts through attacking credibility of the accuser. Moreover, the analysis of rhetorical appeals showed that emotional appeal was the most prevalent and logical appeal was the least common rhetorical strategy used in the Twitter posts. Emotional appeal (pathos) was equally employed by the candidates, while Trump focused on logical appeal (logos) more and on credibility appeal (ethos) less than Clinton. The results showed that the frequency of the use of rhetorical strategies varied based on the functions of the posts. Finally, the analysis revealed that Twitter users favorited and got engaged with character topic more than policy issues. Popularity and engagement of acclaims were more than attacks in Trump's posts, and less than attacks in Clinton's tweets. Attacking the accuser while simply denying the accusation attracted the most number of favorites in Trump's posts, whereas bolstering was the most popular image repair strategy used by Clinton. Credibility appeal was the most successful rhetorical strategy in terms of gaining more number of favorites and retweets, whereas emotional appeal attracted the most comments. Logical appeal successfully attracted likes and shares from Clinton's followers, while it had the least popularity among Trump's followers. The analysis also revealed that videos boosted the popularity and engagement of the Twitter posts of both candidates, whereas links had no significant effect on them. Images and hashtags had positive effect on Clinton's posts and negative effect on Trump's posts in terms of attracting more number of favorites, retweets, and comments.