The Pirates of Czechia: The Curse of Preferential Vote

At the 2017 parliamentary elections in Czechia, the Czech Pirate Party was unprecedentedly successful compared to most Pirate Party in Europe. However, while the Pirate-led alliance PirSTAN won 15.62% of the votes in the 2021 Parliamentary Election, the number of Pirate MPs dropped from 22 to 4. The goal of this paper is therefore to explain this decline. We show that the pirates’ failures were primarily due to the tactical and strategic failures of the pirates, who, although acting as a data-based party, were unable to assess the danger of an electoral alliance with STAN, whose local and regional reputation and tactics targeting preferences have managed to minimize the representation of pirates.