How to assess the emergence of the European Pirate Parties. Towards a research agenda

The purpose of this paper is to assess the emergence of the pirate movements in the European Union. Our goal is to sketch the steps towards a research agenda for this grassroots political movement which gained momentum since 2009. To attain our goal we showed the re-signification of the concept of piracy in the debate around intellectual property and its institutional settlement. Afterwards we analysed the big political themes of several European Pirate Parties and their struggle to follow the preferences of the median voter. We concluded with a set of hypotheses of which the most important is that the pirates will inscribe neither to the left nor to the right part of the political spectrum.