The emergence of the information society has resulted in an unprecedented debate on issues such as internet censorship and surveillance, privacy, and copyright. Such issues have been mobilized through the channels of party politics by pirate parties, which represent an almost ideal-typical manifestation of the niche party phenomenon. This paper provides the first comparative analysis of the impact of contextual factors on the cross-national variations in the levels of pirate voting by focussing on the 11 countries in which pirate parties contested EP elections between 2009 and 2014. The analysis is performed using QCA, and suggests that the interplay between five contextual factors play an important role in influencing the different levels of pirate voting across Europe: the saliency of macro-economic issues; the levels of trust in political parties; the levels of trust in the internet; the turnout of voters aged 18–24 and the de-alignment of the young voters aged 18–24. On the one hand, the analysis reveals that the failed electoral mobilization of young voters, as reflected in the low levels of turnout of young adults, plays a prominent role in explaining why the majority of pirate parties are electorally unsuccessful. On the other hand, however, the analysis of the most favourable breeding grounds for significant levels of pirate voting to take place suggests that such an outcome is usually not dependent on the levels of turnout of young voters, but is rather influenced by a more complex interaction between the other contextual factors under investigation.
