All on the same boat? Voting for pirate parties in comparative perspective
| Author | Simon Otjes |
| DOI | 10.1177/0263395719833274 |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395719833274
Politics
2020, Vol. 40(1) 38 –53
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0263395719833274
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All on the same boat?
Voting for pirate parties in
comparative perspective
Simon Otjes
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Universiteit Leiden, the Netherlands
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Internet politics, libertarianism, pirate parties, political trust, voting behaviour
Received: 5th October 2018; Revised version received: 14th January 2019; Accepted: 22nd January 2019
Introduction
In a globalized world with digital connections between countries, new political parties can
spread quickly. A clear example of this is the pirate party family: after the Pirate Party was
founded in Sweden in 2006, it was copied in more than 50 countries (Burkart, 2014: 2).
This growth is remarkable. It stands in contrast to the slower growth of other new party
families, such as the populist radical right. One might question what unites this family of
‘flash parties’ (Hartleb, 2013: 358). On one hand, one might expect that these parties
appeal to different constituencies as they are marginal parties in many countries. The larger
ones may have won support for specific national reasons. On the other hand, these parties
have been characterized as single-issue parties (Niedermayer, 2010: 850; Zolleis et al.,
2010). Perhaps different pirate parties appeal to voters in a consistent way due to their
focus on privacy. The central question of this article is as follows: Under what conditions
do voters vote for pirate parties and are these conditions similar between countries?
Research into pirate parties is underdeveloped (Maškarinec, 2017: 6). Comparative
research has examined the election manifestos of pirate parties (Jääsaari and Hildén, 2015b),
their organization (Bolleyer et al., 2015) and their development from the perspective of the
social movement literature (Burkart, 2014; Cammaerts, 2015). This gives us an insight into
what these parties want, how they operate, and how they seek to mobilize voters. We know
Corresponding author:
Simon Otjes, Documentation Centre Dutch Political Parties, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Broerstraat 4,
9712 CP Groningen, The Netherlands.
Email: s.p.otjes@rug.nl
833274POL0010.1177/0263395719833274PoliticsOtjes
research-article2019
Article
Otjes 39
little about why voters vote for pirate parties. Yet, mobilizing voters is crucial for the con-
tinued existence of a party and its ability to realize its programme. The only comparative
study in the field looks at country-level explanations (Zulianello, 2017). Most international
academic attention has focused on the first pirate party (from Sweden) (Demker, 2014;
Erlingsson and Persson, 2011). This study builds further on the work of Erlingsson and
Persson (2011) as it seeks to determine whether voters support pirate parties because of its
programme or because of its protest appeal.
One might question why one would study voting for a ‘waning’ party family
(Frederiksson Almqvist, 2016b). There are three reasons to do this. First, these parties
have not uniformly lost support. The Pirates have become a stable feature in Icelandic
politics, and the Czech Pirate Party came third in the 2017 national election. The develop-
ment of pirate parties does not appear to be one of linear growth. This makes it even more
important to understand to what extent the appeal of these parties is consistent between
countries and periods.
Second, the rise of pirate parties should be understood in the context of new forms of
online political engagement, such as social media revolutions like the Arab Spring or
information freedom communities like WikiLeaks (Beyer, 2014). By understanding what
drives voting for a pirate party, one can understand how digital culture and the political
sphere interact.
Third, by studying whether political distrust or policy preferences drive voting for
pirate parties, one can shed light on an issue that has fascinated political scientists for dec-
ades: whether new party support reflects general political dissatisfaction or specific policy
concerns (Lago and Martínez, 2011; Van der Brug et al., 2000). Pirate parties offer an
important case to study, as they can be linked to both clear programmatic appeals, in terms
of the protection of digital rights, and to political distrust, as ‘anti-party’ parties.
This article will have the following structure. The first section introduces the pirate
party family, their development, and shared programme. The second section looks at two
specific hypotheses concerning voting for pirate parties. The methodological section
introduces six surveys that are used here. This article examines voting for pirate parties in
11 different countries from Northern, Central, and Western Europe. After the discussion
of the results, conclusions will be drawn about the hypotheses and the role of programme
and protest in the parties’ appeal.
The pirate family
The pirate party family has its roots in Sweden. Rick Falkvinge founded the Swedish
Pirate Party in January 2006 in response to government policies regarding file sharing
(Erlingsson and Persson, 2011: 122). Sweden has an active pirate movement around The
Pirate Bay, a website that facilitates the online peer-to-peer file sharing, and Piratbyrån
(the Bureau of Piracy), a loosely organized think tank on copyright-related issues (Miegel
and Olsson, 2008: 203). The term ‘pirate’ itself was reappropriated from the representa-
tives of music and film industry that label people that share copyrighted files peer-to-peer
as ‘pirates’ (Bartels, 2012: 20–21). The Swedish Pirate Party gained public attention in
May 2006, when it protested against a police raid on the facility hosting the Pirate Bay.
Its membership grew spectacularly (Beyer, 2014). In that year, however, the party only
gained 0.6% of the vote in the general election. The party grew further in Sweden as pri-
vacy and copyright issues were in the public eye: in 2009, individuals behind the Pirate
Bay were found guilty of illegal file-sharing. In that year, the party won 7.1% of the vote
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