Anticipating Office: Does the Populist Radical Right Decrease Its Populist Communication When It Has the Opportunity to Join Government?

The 'inclusion-moderation thesis' suggests that populist parties will be tamed by government inclusion. However, empirical evidence is mixed. We argue that this may be explained by different strategic contexts. We hypothesize that populist parties that rely on coalition partners will reduce their populist communication when they have credible government prospects. We analyse multiple years of political communication by two radical-right populist parties, the Swiss People's Party (SVP) and the Freedom Party of Austria (FP & Ouml;). Although the two parties are rather similar ideologically, this is a most different systems design (MDSD). While the SVP is a typical governing party that was only in opposition once (2007/2008), the FP & Ouml; is typically in opposition, with recent government experience (2017-2019). This empirical analysis focuses on these crucial periods. We find evidence of moderation before joining government for both parties in our pooled analysis. However, individual analyses suggest that this was much clearer for the SVP.