Digital Sovereignty by Design: AI Governance and Bloc Hedging Capacity in Latin America and Central-Eastern Europe — Replication Package

Replication package for "Digital Sovereignty by Design: AI Governance and Bloc Hedging Capacity in Latin America and Central-Eastern Europe" (Merlet Echavarría, in preparation; target: Multinational Business Review, Emerald, Special Issue "Digital Innovation, Geopolitics, and International Business"). This dataset examines how AI governance readiness, institutional quality, market size, and AI regulatory autonomy relate to a semi-peripheral country's capacity to hedge between competing digital blocs (China via Belt and Road Initiative signatory status, and the historically dominant regional bloc — the United States for Latin America, the European Union for Central and Eastern Europe). N=38 countries (19 Latin America + 19 Central and Eastern Europe), same sample as the companion study "Semi-Peripheral Convergence: Institutional Quality and AI Governance Readiness in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe." Method: fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), direct calibration method (Ragin 2008). Includes three build scripts (dataset construction, calibration, truth table and Boolean minimization), raw input files (Oxford Insights Government AI Readiness Index 2025, World Bank WGI 2024, World Bank GDP current US$), and the final calibrated dataset with truth table output. Methodological note: Boolean minimization was implemented in Python (sympy), not the R QCA package; cross-validation with dedicated QCA software is recommended before treating results as final. One solution path rests on a single empirical case (El Salvador) and should be read as an exploratory/deviant-case finding, not a generalizable pattern. Full source-by-source coding justification is provided in the README.