Linguistic Identity of Political Parties: The Discourse of Selected Pakistani Election Campaign Songs
Keywords:
political parties, representation, identity construction, critical discourse analysis, election campaign songsAbstract
Political songs are important ideological sites where ideologies are constructed, articulated, and disseminated. The current study attempts to explore how through highlighting positive qualities and mitigating negative qualities of self and through the projection of negative attributes of others and mitigating their positive traits, identities are constructed discursively in the political songs during elections in Pakistan. The sample for the study consists of lyrics of election campaign songs of the two main political parties in Pakistan, namely, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and Pakistan Muslim League (N), played during the general elections of 2018. The analysis of the data is undertaken with the analytical paradigm of critical discourse analysis and van Dijk’s socio-cognitive framework (2004). The study has also taken insights from Social Identity Theory (Oktar, 2001). The analysis provides evidence that these election campaign songs at the textual level represent the political parties in the
sociopolitical scenario in Pakistani Society. The findings further reveal that to achieve the prime objective of winning over people’s favor these political parties seek legitimization by utilizing different ideological discourse structures and strategies. These ideological discourse structures could broadly be categorized under two main strategies: positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation. Through the ideological construction of self and others, such political discourses serve in-group social power interests of the supremacy of the political parties. The analysis also establishes that the political song lyrics, as political discourses, construct a unique identity of the political parties by positively evaluating the actions and behaviors of the in-group as against the negative evaluation of those of the out-group. Besides theoretical contributions, the findings of the study also have practical significance and expand readers’ critical insight and assist in comprehending, interpreting, and producing language in a political domain in society.
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