When Trust Runs Low: Self-Reliance, Benevolence, and Political Cynicism in Social Entrepreneurial Intention
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Abstract
Citizens of many developing democracies have grown weary of the officials meant to represent them, and Indonesia is no exception: survey evidence documents a public that doubts politicians' honesty yet still looks to civil society, rather than the state, to solve social problems. Social entrepreneurship is often framed as civic empowerment, the conviction that ordinary people, not government programs, must build and financially sustain solutions. We contend that this framing understates a subtler precondition: aspiring social entrepreneurs do not need to believe government will help them, but they plausibly need to believe government will allow them to proceed. Using survey data from 569 Indonesian respondents (Jakpat online panel), we test whether self-reliance and benevolence are associated with social entrepreneurial intention (SEI) and whether political cynicism, the belief that officials are self-interested and dishonest, moderates these relationships. A confirmatory factor analysis supported the convergent and discriminant validity of all four measures (all AVE > .59, all HTMT < .85) before hypothesis testing. Hierarchical moderated regression showed benevolence positively associated with SEI in the full model (b = .259, p < .001) and self-reliance positively associated with SEI in an additive model (b = .155, p = .011), though the self-reliance coefficient attenuated to nonsignificance once interaction terms were entered (b = .093, p = .125). Political cynicism significantly and robustly weakened the benevolence-SEI relationship (b = -.201, p < .001), while leaving the self-reliance-SEI relationship unaffected, consistent with an asymmetry in which other-oriented motivation, more than agentic self-reliance, depends on expecting the state to leave well-intentioned actors alone. Political cynicism was also, unexpectedly, positively and directly associated with SEI (b = .137, p = .002), and an exploratory analysis found self-reliance's association with SEI to be stronger among women than men (b = .270, p = .022), a pattern not observed for benevolence. Theoretical, practical, and policy implications are discussed.
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