New Political Actors in the Informational Era: The Pirate Party

The spread of digital instruments into the political arenas has not only changed parties’ communicational strategies and their way of acting towards citizens, institutions and civil society organisations. It supports also the emergence of new social and political subjects that act, communicate and create their weltanschauung mainly trough and by the web. The aim of this paper is to describe the principal features of one of these subjects, the Pirate Party, by analyzing its cultural and political traits, its values and most significant political issues, its organizational model, its relationships with activists and participants, and its representations of politics and democracy. By collecting the mentioned characteristics, the paper compares this example of “cyber-party” with those concerning traditional Italian parties, i.e. the Democratic Party and the PdL one. In fact, even if the last mentioned parties use web-based technologies and Internet as channels of communication and means to strengthen the relationship between voters and party (features that, according to Hellen Margetts definition’s, could put them into the ideal type of “cyber-party), their logic of action and their political cultures are deeply tied with a “pre-internet” era. Therefore, the study will show some potential dimensions useful for an increasing process of indicators construction’s able to reach a better distinction between “fake” cyber-parties and “native” ones. The grounding hypothesis, which led the entire study, is that, in fact, cyber-parties are only those organisations which born, and develop themselves, not only into the cyber-space, but also by representing political issues and social needs spread out through the displaying of the so-called informationalism paradigm. Therefore, there should be a significant difference within the process of definition of these parties, concerning not only the use of digital instruments, or their organisational features, but also, and above all, their nature.