The Pirates of Czechia: the Curse of Preferential Vote

In the 2017 Czech parliamentary election, the Czech Pirate Party succeed unprecedentedly, compared to most of the Pirate parties across 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. So, the aim of this paper is to explain this slump. We show that fall of the Pirates was caused mainly by the tactical and strategic failure 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, together with tactics aimed at polling preference votes, managed to minimise the representation of Pirates