Pirate Parties and the Pathologies of Party Organisation in the Digital Age

As Green parties several decades earlier, Pirate Parties have recently emerged in numerous democracies, claiming to re-invent the way to engage into politics. Fighting for the reform of laws on copyright, data privacy and freedom of information, their organizations are characterized by inclusiveness, intra-party democracy and the rejection of hierarchical, elitist structures, implemented by the use of new technologies able to maximize individual voice. This paper assesses the possibilities and pathologies inherent in structures adopted by two electorally successful Pirate Parties that managed to enter the parliamentary arena – the German Pirates and the Swedish Pirate Party (winning seats in regional parliaments and the European parliament respectively). Having climbed the threshold of representation just recently, both already show signs of decline. Since these parties consider and organize themselves as ‘on-going dialogue’ or ‘open network’ without clear-cut organizational boundaries, they compromise their capacity to generate lasting commitment among followers through selective recruitment strategies. While these structures that exploit the potential of modern technologies allow these parties to rapidly mobilise an enormous following as long as their core issues are politically salient, the same structures undermine parties’ capacity to sustain such support in the medium- and long run, once the salience of their core issues declines.