Bridging Populism and Conspiracy in Radical Right-Wing Politics. A comparison between SVP and FPÖ

Populism and conspiracy are increasingly significant in academic research, yet their analytic relationship remains relatively underexplored. This study proposes an original framework to address whether and how conspiracy and populist narratives manifest and interact in radical right politics. Our paper will develop an analytical approach based upon a fuzzy logic perspective (e.g. Ragin 2020). This perspective allows us to provide (1) a set of dimensions distinguishing and overlapping populism and conspiracy as discursive frames, (2) to combine such dimensions in order to identify ‘light’ and ‘full-blown’ conspirational and populist narratives. While we adopt a post-Laclauian definition of populism (e.g. Vulovic & Palonen, 2022; Ballacci, 2023), taking ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ as ‘empty signifiers,’ we incorporate insights from emerging literature on new/pragmatic and old/classic conspiracy (Rosenblum & Muirhead, 2019; Urbinati, 2022). Although populism often relies on conspiracy theories, recent studies highlight a shift to conspiracies stripped of the ‘theory’ component (Rosenblum & Muirhead, 2019). Nonetheless, we acknowledge the persistent circulation of conspiracy theories and the potential of political actors to capitalize on them at certain times for political gains. Aiming to illustrate the heuristic utility of our framework, we will compare social media discourses by the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) and the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) one year prior to the most recent national elections. The discursive use of conspiracy and populism in political party communication opens avenues for future research on the persistence and adaptation of the radical right across socio-political contexts and communication platforms.