The use of social media in political communication: A research on parliamentary advisors

The concept of globalization, which has been mentioned by scientists all over the world, has led to many developments and has also caused changes and transformations in many branches of science. Especially in social sciences, globalization, the rapid development of technology, the increase in the desire of individuals to obtain information, the increase in the speed of information dissemination with technological tools have led to the emergence of new concepts. Social media, which is frequently used by almost everyone and has become a part of daily life, is one of the concepts that has entered the literature in the last 15 years. In the study, the relationship between the concept of political communication, which is the subject of political science, and social media was compared, and the issue of whether social media is seen as a political communication tool by the voters was examined. The study consists of 4 parts in total. In the first part of the study, there is the introduction part. In the second part of the study, it is mentioned how the concept of political communication emerged in the historical process and with which approaches it was defended. At the same time, actors in political communication, political communication techniques and political communication tools are explained in detail. In the third part of the study, after which processes the concept of social media emerged, the elements that enabled it to emerge, social media tools, the relationship of social media with the concept of communication, and finally, the advantages and disadvantages of social media in terms of political communication were explained in detail. In this way, it has been tried to understand whether social media is accepted as a political communication tool in the literature. In the field research part, which is the last part of the study, field work was applied to the parliamentary advisors in the Turkish Grand National Assembly. In this study, it was measured at what level social media is used as a political communication tool. Bostancı's (2015) "Social Media Usage Levels" scale, whose reliability and validity analyzes were performed before, was used as a data collection tool in the research. The data obtained as a result of the study were analyzed by the SPSS 23 package program. As a result of the analysis, it has been determined that the parliamentary consultants use social media and at what level they see social media as a political communication tool.