Icelandic Pirate Party Radical/Deliberative Democracy

The Icelandic Pirate Party received an important media coverage after the 2016 Icelandic legislative elections. For these elections, the pirate program was noticeably oriented towards the protection of individual freedoms, and campaigned for the adoption of the Constitution of Popular Origin of 2012, appreciated for its call for a responsibility of the rulers towards the governed. The Icelandic Pirate Party has no designated representative, but its deputies act as high-profile spokespersons. Hence, on-line / off-line hybridization within the party is strong, as its members have an online discussion and voting tool open to all of them. The measures voted on this device must discussed in a physical meeting before they can be proposed online. While deliberation is a central tool of the democratic functioning of the party, deliberative practices are constrained both by the set of values borrowed from the international "pirate codex" values, and the pressure induced by the exceptional timing and expectations due to the repeated elections in Iceland (legislative in 2016, legislative in 2017, municipal in 2018). In my presentation, I will expose the specificities of a partisan deliberative system as a condition for the inclusion of new audiences, and question the resurgence of "agonistic" elements (Hayat, 2011) and sketch an articulation of deliberative democracy with participatory democracy through a radical theory of participation. This work proposes to present the first results of an ongoing research through the archives of the executive committee meetings, direct observations during the 2017 election period of formal and informal meetings, and in-depth interviews with active members of the Icelandic Piratar (executive committee members, candidates, members/volunteers present at the party headquarters during the elections).