Pirate Party Research Articles

Jóvenes y su participación ciudadana a través de los wiki partidos y el partido digital en México 2018

La crisis de credibilidad que durante años construyeron los Partidos Políticos y un desencanto casi generalizado en contra de la forma en que se ejerce la política y la reforma electoral que entró en vigor en enero de 2014, son algunos de los indicadores que provocaron que emergiera una oleada de Candidaturas Independientes cuyos resultados trajeron consigo la oxigenación parcial del sistema político mexicano y abrieron un nuevo debate sobre el Empoderamiento Ciudadano. Inspirados en la idea de un Wiki Partido —donde la participación fuese a través de las tecnologías y de las redes sociales---, y los modelos de los Partidos Piratas de Alemania y Suecia, distintos grupos de jóvenes en todo México comenzaron los trabajos de organización de un Wiki Partido y de un Partido Digital encaminados a impulsar Candidaturas Independientes y Ciudadanas.

Ten years of liquid democracy research

Ten years have passed since in 2009 two independent technical systems pioneered liquid democracy (LD): Župa, a system developed for the Student Organisation of FIS in Slovenia, followed closely by LiquidFeedback, which served the Pirate Party in Berlin, Germany. First academic papers appeared in 2010 targeting the e-democracy research community, and later followed by researchers from artificial intelligence. This paper provides an overview of the scholarly discussions that developed in the past decade, and the technical implementations and initiatives that emerged.

Patterns and sources of the association between intelligence, party identification, and political orientations

We examined the association between intelligence, party identification, and political orientations using genetically informative data gathered from German twins and their families (n = 9553 individuals including 1524 adolescent and young-adult twin pairs). The results indicated that supporters of the Pirate Party and the Green Party had levels of intelligence that were significantly higher than those of other party identifiers, with the exception of individuals who preferred the Free Democrats. These findings were remarkably similar to results based on British research participants that were reported in a previous study. We also observed a significant, albeit modest, negative correlation between intelligence and political conservatism, and our data indicated that this correlation could be accounted for by common genetic influences on those two variables. The findings of the study were interpreted in light of competing theories on the nature of the relationship between intelligence, party identification, and political orientations.

Crossing the left-right party divide? Understanding the electoral success of the Czech Pirate Party in the 2017 parliamentary elections

In the 2017 Czech parliamentary election, the Czech Pirate Party (Pirates) gained 10.79% of the votes – an unprecedented success, compared to most of the pirate parties across Europe. However, as their electoral gain varies widely across the Czech Republic’s territory, this article analyses all (more than 6000) Czech municipalities in the elections of 2010, 2013, and 2017 to explain this variation. Overall, the success of the Pirates was driven especially by obtaining much more support in larger municipalities with younger populations (although not only those aged 18–24 but also older ones), lower unemployment, higher turnout, and lower support for leftist parties. Thus, from a spatial perspective, the patterns of Pirate voting largely resembled long-term spatial support for Czech rightist parties and we can conclude that the Pirates made considerable inroads to regions which had historically been strongholds of the Civic Democratic Party, as the former main party of the right, but also strongholds of minor right-wing (‘liberal centre’) parties of the 1990s and early 2000s. Success of the Pirates thus was based especially on votes from municipalities located in more developed areas, where the Pirates received many more votes than in structurally disadvantaged regions.

Facebook as a ‘trusted space of everyday communication’: Parties, citizens and direct representation

Detailing processes related to direct representation in a longitudinal fashion, the study at hand gauges the degree to which Swedish political parties have utilized their Facebook pages during a four-year period covering two elections. Moreover, the study provides insights into citizen interaction by measuring the types of engagement preferred by Facebook users in relation to the party pages. Results indicate that while the bulk of parties appear as largely organizing their online activity in relation to election campaigns, the small, non-parliamentary Pirate Party emerges as taking an approach more in line with the permanent campaign aspect of direct representation. Moreover, while results indicate that citizens are indeed engaging with parties on Facebook, they do so mostly through ‘liking’ rather than commenting – arguably a tendency suggesting limited interest in online discussion and deliberation.

Two Variants of the Digital Party: The Platform Party and the Networked Party

This article focuses on the impact of online participation platforms on the internal organization and democracy of a set of emerging political parties such as the Five Star Movement, Podemos, France Insoumise, the Pirate Parties and Barcelona en Comu. Taking cue from the recent publication of Paolo Gerbaudo's book The Digital Party, the article argues that digital parties can be divided in two ideal party types: the platform party and the networked party. Whereas the platform party is highly centralized, led by a charismatic leader, and strictly focused on the electoral competition, the networked party is a more decentralized ideal party type, which allows policy proposals and leadership positions emerge from the network itself. The article concludes by noting that while it would be easy to cast these two variants of the digital party as an alternative between political realism and political idealism, both types of parties face symmetrical challenges such as how to move beyond plebiscitarian consultations and how to scale deliberation from the local level to the national level.

Anarchy in Iceland? The global left, pirates and socialists in post-crash Icelandic politics

ABSTRACTThe historically stable Icelandic political party system has been uprooted since the 2008 financial crisis. In this paper, we explore to what extent the global left movement of anarchists and socialists has manifested in Icelandic politics in this period. We provide a historical overview, starting with the 2008 financial crisis which brought to power the first entirely left-wing government in the country's history, but also gave birth to numerous new political parties that alternately united and divided socialists, anarchists and reformers. The Pirate Party spearheaded this movement from the 2013 elections, but internal disputes have plagued the party in recent years, and both they and the Left Greens now have a fresh challenge from the left: the Socialist Party. We conclude that the current prospects for a united uprising of these movements are dim, although history suggests that they can work together when focusing on common goals of political reform.

The effects of deliberation in Czech Pirate Party: the case of coalition formation in Brno (2018)

The Czech Pirate Party is one of the most electorally successful Pirate parties in the world. In this article, we analyse the effect of its intra-party deliberation preceding participation in an executive coalition in the second biggest Czech city, Brno, after the 2018 local election. The study relies on a combination of party open online discussions and discourse from local party elites. We focus on the effects on the coalition formation process, especially the relations with coalition partners, the intra-party effects on the whole party, and the local party organization.

Deliberative democracy and political parties: functions and consequences

Research on intra-party deliberation focuses extensively on its normative aspects and its potential benefits for democratic quality. Little is known about how deliberation functions in practice and the consequences it has. This symposium aims to fill this gap in the literature by bringing together four examples of political parties that use deliberative practices: the Czech Pirate Party, the Danish Alternativet, the Romanian Demos, and the Spanish Workers’ Socialist Party. The symposium maps the use of deliberation and identifies effects such as high quality of internal decision-making process, legitimacy of those running for public office, and electoral performance.

Digital movement parties: a comparative analysis of the technopolitical cultures and the participation platforms of the Movimento 5 Stelle and the Piratenpartei

ABSTRACT The Pirate Party of Germany (PPG) and the Italian 5-Star Movement (5SM) are two digital movement parties that share several ideological features, including their roots in anti-establishment movements, their refusal to position themselves on the Left-Right spectrum, and their belief that the Internet increases the capacity of ordinary citizens for self-government and self-representation. To this end, both parties have adopted online participation platforms, which allow their members to contribute to the development of the party program, vote on strategic decisions, and propose policy initiatives. Given these affinities and given that both parties begun their political ascendancy in the same years, their antipodal political destinies – ascendency to power for the 5SM, downfall for the PPG – are all the more striking. This article accounts for this divergence by showing how the technopopulist orientation of both parties conceals in fact radically different conceptions of political participation and internal party democracy. To this end, it considers the role that different technopolitical cultures have played in shaping the organization of these two parties in their early stages, and how the subsequent adoption and use of online participation platforms has led to internal strife and bitter disputes within the PPG and increasing centralization within the 5SM.

On digital front-runners and late-comers: Analyzing issue competition over digitization in German subnational elections

AbstractDespite the sweeping societal and economic transformation brought about by digitization, it has remained a relatively marginal topic in elections, with parties having few incentives to signal commitment to digitization. Why then would parties start to do so? We address this question by examining party manifestos from German subnational elections in the period between 2010 and 2018. Our analysis contributes to the research on issue competition by looking at why parties engage with the topic of the digitization even though it has neither become politicized nor salient, at present. We find, first, that parties emphasize digitization more in regions belonging to the mid-tier in terms of their degree of digital modernization. Second, parties with more resources and greater ideological compatibility signal more commitment to digitization. Finally, electoral success of the Pirate Party as a credible challenger has been followed by greater emphasis on digitization, especially among the ideologically closest competitors.

All on the same boat? Voting for pirate parties in comparative perspective

The rise of pirate parties in Europe since 2006 has been tempestuous and uneven. One may question whether the reasons citizens vote for these parties are the same between different countries. This article identifies two reasons citizens may vote for these parties: political distrust and concerns about privacy. This article tests which of these two underlies support for pirate parties. It uses six surveys covering 11 countries with a total 43,786 respondents. These analyses show that political distrust primarily drives support for pirate parties.

Assured Newcomers on a Squally Sea? The Czech Pirate Party before and after the 2017 Elections

The elections to the Chamber of Deputies in October 2017 were a turning point for the Czech Pirate Party (called “Piráti”). It was the first time since establishing the party in 2009 that the Pirates entered the lower house of the Czech Parliament. They took the third place with 10.79 % votes and won 22 seats out of 200. Their main programme points came out of typical “pirate policies” like control of power and the powerful ones, simplification of the running of the state through technology, protection of citizens from bullying and defence of freedom as well as basic Pirate principles including liberalism and direct democracy. Their programme was called “New Ideas for the New Age”. From a different view, this party presented itself as a watchdog of democracy and as an alternative mostly for liberal voters. This qualitative case study will provide a complex overview of the Pirate phenomenon in the Czech Republic from their establishment to their current role of an opposition party. This article aims to show and describe how the position of the Czech Pirates has varied over time. For this purpose, open data from the Czech Statistical Office (CZSO) and the findings from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) dataset will be used. It is possible to say that the Pirates are playing the role of newcomers in the Chamber of Deputies after the 2017 elections, but they are not newcomers in the Czech party system.

NEW TRENDS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PARTY SYSTEM OF THE CZECH REPUBLIC

The article examines the development of the political process in the Czech Republic following the results of the last regular elections to the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament, which took place on October 21-22, 2017 under the proportional electoral system. The results of the elections revealed a number of new trends in the development of the parties and the party system of the Czech Republic, which at the same time have many similarities with the ideas of populists and Euro skeptics spread in the CEE region.
 The analysis of the specific “differentiated electoral barrier” and the Czech electoral legislation is made. The path to victory in the elections of the ANO and the ODS parties, the new in the Czech politics third party-winner – the Pirate party, members of which advocated the maximum protection of individual freedoms and the uncontrolled Internet. It is noted that the traditional and leading parties of the Czech Republic – KDU-CSL, TOP 9, KSCM, CSSD did not achieve the expected success in the Parliament elections.
 The regularities that emerged during the elections to the Chamber of Deputies were revealed: a steady demand of voters for new leaders, new political forces, the weakening of the positions and authority of political parties that have occupied leading positions for a long period, the change in the current political agenda. Confirmed pan-European trends: the growth of populist sentiment and a significant increase in skepticism towards the leaders of the European Union, which are manifested in many CEE countries.

Ako skúmať voľby v priestore mesta: prípad snemovných volieb 2017 v Prahe

The study uses the 2017 parliamentary elections results to analyses spatial patterns of votes in the city of Prague. A unique approach combining contextual and compositional data is introduced. Census data and data indicating the quality of life are reassigned to a shared entity – an address point, and analysed via automatic linear modelling. The model explained 69 % of spatial variance of votes share for the conservative TOP 09 party and the winning ANO 2011 movement, but only 19 % for the Pirate Party and the Mayors and Independence movement. Future research might focus on finding variables which would explain spatial variance of these parties’ vote shares. Abother possibility is the development of a methodology for studying votes spatiality within urban areas, in order to develop a robust theory.

From Resurrection and New Dawn to the Pirate Party: Political Party Names as Symbolizing Recent Transformations in the Political Field in Iceland

ABSTRACT2008 saw the beginning of a massive financial crisis in Iceland, marked by the collapse of the banking system, the failure of state pension funds, and months of political upheaval. Angry and bewildered Icelanders, newly aware that their image of themselves as exceptional and egalitarian new age Vikings was hollow, and that the pre-crash rhetoric of ‘prosperity for all’ had only ever been ‘prosperity for the very few’, sought to reconfigure the political field. New parties, with new names that signified a very different conceptualization of Iceland and Icelanders, emerged. In this paper we examine the move in Iceland from a handful of parties which drew on a common symbolization of Iceland as a classless society rooted in land and shared history, to the contemporary plethora of parties which promise, for example, a ‘bright future’, or style themselves as ‘pirates’ who will re-start Iceland.

Niche Parties and Social Movements: Mechanisms of Programmatic Alignment and Party Success

AbstractNiche parties often originate in social movements, yet the latter’s role in shaping these parties has received scant attention. I argue that movement roots can help niche parties achieve both vote- and policy-seeking goals by keeping core issues salient, bolstering issue ownership and securing allies in civil society. Employing interviews with movement, as well as Green and Pirate party leaders in Sweden and Germany, I identify three mechanisms (electoral pressure, grassroots linkage, elite orientation) that lead to programmatic alignment. This article extends an emerging research agenda that highlights how social movements shape party politics and offers evidence that niche party–movement interactions open new avenues for political representation counterbalancing mainstream parties’ increasing detachment from civil society.

Individual Responses to Institutional Demands in Practice: The Case of Transparency

Scholars are increasingly interested in individual responses to institutional demands. Much attention has been paid to the role of gradual changes in the field position of organizations. However, we know little about how individual responses to institutional demands are affected by a radical change of field position. We address this gap by examining the institutional demands of transparency, an ambiguous institution that permeates ever more sectors of contemporary society. Taking a practice-theory lens, we studied the Pirate Party Germany, a political organization dedicated to maximum transparency that experienced a radical field position change after being elected into four German state parliaments. We found three practices that individual actors developed in response to this change, aiming at reducing transparency in their day-to-day operations: rerouting the time and place of actions, reclassifying the ground of actions, and recalling the monitoring of actions. These findings contribute to a better und...

Unpacking the Transparency-Secrecy Nexus: Frontstage and backstage behaviour in a political party

While the majority of research promotes the idea of transparency and puts all efforts into refining existing concepts, critical studies emphasize the performativity of measures to increase visibility. The article theorizes the nexus of transparency and secrecy by drawing on Erving Goffman’s frontstage/backstage theory, according to which actors vie to maintain boundaries of visibility by alternating these two types of situations. Using this approach, the article interprets the emergence of new forms of secrecy in reaction to transparency measures as efforts to maintain or create boundaries of visibility between front- and backstage. This perspective is empirically applied to a study on parliamentarian representatives of the Pirate Party of Germany, a political party that tries to be as transparent as possible and vows to live up to this ambition when elected. The study demonstrates that an organization which deprives itself of boundaries of visibility between frontstage and backstage faces obstacles which lead it to eventually introduce such boundaries. This study, therefore, offers an in-depth examination of the limitations of transparency and its unintended consequences.

Iceladic Pirate Party as a “New Pirates”

Iceladic Pirate Party as a “New Pirates”