The discussion of crowdfunding policies among policymakers

Abstract

Public policies originate in different fields. Multiple stakeholders may be involved in their development and may exert an influence at different stages of the policymaking process. This paper analyzes how legislators discuss crowdfunding policies in Spain in the initial stages of the policymaking process. The paper analyzes the discussion of crowdfunding in the lower and upper houses of Spanish parliament over the last five legislatures (2011–2021). Semantic analysis was carried out. The corpus was defined based on the official government website, where all crowdfunding policymaking initiatives are registered. The most relevant and frequent combination of crowdfunding phenomena was related to start-ups and entrepreneurship. This research provides insights into the business areas where crowdfunding has been discussed in parliamentary sessions. Although this study focuses on Spain, the semantic analysis is broad enough to generalize the results to other countries in future research. The study sheds light on a novel area of research on perceptions toward crowdfunding. This study can help in creating persuasive messages and a secure ecosystem to attract investors and funding on crowdfunding platforms.