Exploring the effects of institutional arrangements on the rate of social entrepreneurship: a comparative cross-country study

This paper investigates the effect of Scott\'s (1995) regulative, cognitive and normative institutional arrangements on the prevalence of social entrepreneurship based on data from the 2015 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. The study employs principal component and OLS multiple regression analysis to construct the institutional dimensions with a large set of variables before relating these variables to social entrepreneurship. That way, the study aims to increase the explained part of the cross-national variation in social entrepreneurial prevalence within the context of institutional theory. The contribution of this is two-fold. First, the study integrates with the important process of filling the empirical gap in the field of social entrepreneurship research. Second, it adds further depth to the scrutiny of the contextual drivers of social entrepreneurship by analyzing newer data and incorporating a greater range of institutional factors. The results suggest that the prevalence of social entrepreneurial activity is significantly driven by regulative and cognitive institutional arrangements, but is left unaffected by the normative dimensions of national institutions.