Inclusion-moderation or moderation-inclusion? The role of government perspective for the moderation of populist parties

The rise of populist parties poses a danger to liberal democracies as populism is defined as ‘democratic illiberalism.’ However, the increasing vote share of populist parties during the last decade in Europe makes it increasingly difficult to keep up the ‘cordon sanitaire’ towards them and to form governments without them. The inclusion moderation thesis suggests that populist parties will be tamed once in office. However, the empirical evidence for this is scarce and the underlying mechanisms are complex and seem to be highly context-specific. Additionally, one has largely overlooked reverse causality so far. From a conceptual point of view, while populist may become less populist in government, we argue that the more interesting phase to analyse populist communication is before populist parties join government. In the words of the inclusion-moderation thesis, we therefore suggest that moderation of their populist appeal is rather an important prerequisite for inclusion in coalitions with non-populist partners. We propose a most different system design by comparing the Swiss SVP, the Austrian FPÖ, and the German AfD. Although all three parties are now established forces of their respective national party system, they face fundamentally different challenges in the diverging political systems of their countries. The SVP has been the strongest Swiss party since 2003 and has been part of the typically oversized Swiss Federal Government since 1919. Against the backdrop of the inclusion moderation thesis, 2008 is highly interesting year as this marked the period where the party was formally in opposition. In contrast, the FPÖ is a typical junior coalition party for the major Austrian parties, with the most recent government experience from 2017 to 2019. We expect that both parties became more moderate after they saw the opportunity to (re-) join the government. Finally, the AfD is subject to a cordon sanitaire in Germany: as no other party considers a cooperation with the party at the national level, it has no government perspective at all. Therefore, a further radicalisation before elections and during coalition talks by the other parties is expected, which helps the party to differentiate itself from mainstream parties. Our analysis covers several years of political communication around key events for the three parties, i.e. the 2008 formal opposition period in case of the SVP, government participation for the FPÖ after the 2017 Austrian legislative election and the 2021 German federal election 2021 for the AfD.