Exploring Identities and Ideologies in Political Parties’ Election Manifestos: A Corpus Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The goal of this study is to use corpus-based methods for the critical discourse analysis of election manifestos. Five election manifestos from five political parties of Pakistan namely PPP, PMLN, PTI, JUI, and JI were used in the corpus compilation. These five Pakistani political parties are selected based on the popularity of these political parties in Pakistan. The election manifestos of the political parties were combined into a complete text file. The corpus was analyzed using ANTCONC 3.5.8 software. Van Dijk's Socio-Cognitive Model (1998) was used as a theoretical framework for this study. The results of the study indicate that the political parties use language to exert cognitive control on the public. The use of nouns, pronouns, and modal verbs allows these political parties to transform peoples' ideologies, create identities, and gain control over them.