Transparent qualitative model-building in high-stakes digital governance: a methods protocol for tracing institutional mechanisms.

Digital governance research often identifies what digital systems do but less frequently explains how institutions make those systems governable under legal, organizational, political, and public scrutiny. This methodological problem is especially consequential in election administration, where digital records and platforms affect voting rights, political eligibility, logistics, public information, and the credibility of results. Existing technical audits, adoption studies, maturity assessments, usability evaluations, and trust surveys provide important evidence, but they rarely make the institutional route from records and actor accounts to mechanism-based explanation fully inspectable. This article develops a critical realist qualitative methods protocol for transparent institutional mechanism tracing in high-stakes digital governance. The protocol is not a general framework for all qualitative data analysis; it is specifically designed to reconstruct how organizational capacities are translated into validation, correction, coordination, escalation, auditability, explanation, accountability, and institutional learning. An electoral management body is treated as the main case, while voter data, party and candidate verification, logistics, and results publication constitute embedded analytical arenas. The operational workflow integrates purposive and functionally stratified sampling, process-oriented interviews, document mapping, abductive and mechanism-oriented coding, cross-arena matrices, evidence-strength decisions, rival-explanation assessment, negative-case analysis, audit trails, expert validation, positionality documentation, and tiered transparency. A bounded pilot vignette using publicly available documents from Indonesia's 2024 electoral administration demonstrates how regulatory evidence and institutional explanations can be transformed into action codes, matrix entries, and an evidence-graded candidate mechanism. The protocol contributes an operationally explicit, reviewable, and ethically safeguarded route from qualitative evidence to institutional explanation.