The nature of a populist and radical-right foreign policy: Analysing the freedom party’s participation in the right-wing Austrian government

Abstract

What impact do populist and radical-right ideas have on a country’s foreign policy? Although research on the nexus of populism and foreign policy has taught us much about populists’ conduct of foreign affairs, we still lack distinctive categories characterising the nature of a populist and radical-right foreign policy. Furthermore, the impact of populist and radical-right parties on foreign policy and the question of how to measure this impact is still unanswered. This article seeks to address this research gap by examining the populist and radical-right Freedom Party’s participation in the Austrian government from 2017 to 2019 and by applying a mixed-methods approach to government programmes and official press releases. Overall, the article makes three contributions to the literature. First, it proposes distinctive categories of a populist and radical-right foreign policy conception. Second, it introduces an approach to measure the impact of this conception on a country’s foreign policy. And finally, it determines this impact on Austria’s foreign policy.