Abstract

It is an essential requirement of democracy that politicians provide account of their words and actions to the public. However, being able to account is especially important when a politician or the party he/she is representing is assumed responsible for a critical event that has undesirable consequences for the public. Under such a condition, political press conferences serve as an instrument for a politician to justify the position of the government by means of argumentation. By adopting the pragma-dialectical framework, this paper sets out to explain how a politician maneuvers strategically in a press conference for the purpose of diminishing political responsibility when his party which is in charge of the government is assumed responsible for a critical event. The paper draws its data from the political press conference held by Erdoğan, a former Prime Minister of Turkey, following the mine accident that took place in Soma, Turkey, in 2014.