Pathways to Safeguarding Digital Sovereignty Within a Multi‐Level Governance Framework: A Cross‐National Comparative Study Based on the FsQCA Method

ABSTRACT As global digitalization and cybersecurity threats intensify, digital sovereignty has become increasingly significant as a vital component of national security and economic independence. Utilizing the fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) method and through data from 30 countries, the study identifies internal stability‐driven, externally driven, comprehensively coordinated, and externally dependent pathways to achieving digital sovereignty. These four pathways reveal how countries effectively safeguard their digital sovereignty under different contexts through combinations of international cooperation (IC), legal framework (LF), and technological capability (TC). The study finds that IC, as a universal condition, plays a pivotal role in all pathways, acting both as a “binding agent” in multi‐level governance to connect diverse stakeholders and as a “leveraging factor” to amplify the effects of other conditions. This study not only enriches the theoretical foundation of digital sovereignty, highlighting the necessity of understanding the complexity and diversity of multi‐factor combinations in digital governance, but also provides practical references for the formulation and implementation of digital sovereignty policies on a global scale.