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The authors found this intriguing, as it is doubtful that senior political figures in the major economic powers knew what legal boilerplate was, let alone would advocate for particular clauses. There was policy content in the advocacy, however, over whether ‘market‐based’ (i.e. contractual) changes would suffice to provide for orderly restructuring of sovereign bonds of developing countries in financial crisis. In fact, the CACs in question have yet to face a major test under fire. The authors found little indication of belief among the more than 100 intimately involved people in the CAC debate that they interviewed that the clauses would be important determinants of restructuring outcomes.

This chapter examines the IMF effort to create the sovereign debt‐restructuring mechanism (SDRM) and the forces that lined up in favor of and against the proposal. It emphasizes that different stakeholders had rather different ideas of proposals for reforming the workouts from defaults on private creditors. it saw the mainly European creditor governments that supported developing the SDRM as wishing to give debtor countries greater legal protection against their creditors during debt restructuring, thereby reducing the demand for IMF bailout packages (although it finds little connection between the short‐term financial crisis factors that lead to bailouts and the later process for restructuring sovereign bonds). Conversely, emerging economy governments that issue bonds internationally worried that they would in fact lose access to IMF funding in the event of need and they worried what signal the market might read from the creation of a bankruptcy regime, possibly raising the perceived riskiness and thus interest cost of their obligations.

In this chapter, the editors conclude the book by recognizing that the burden of this book is to demonstrate that an important piece of the international financial architecture is missing and that its absence has been felt in protracted and economically painful workouts from sovereign insolvencies. As the sovereign debt workout processes are political at their core, they tend to benefit the powerful at the expense of the powerless. The editors also emphasize that principles for effective and fair bankruptcy systems for private entities if applied to the sovereign case could better balance the costs and pains of government insolvencies, except that the very nature of sovereignty precludes their direct application. But while there is no global government to enforce any sovereign bankruptcy law, there are various ways that governments can cooperatively formulate and operate a sovereign bankruptcy regime. The concluding chapter of this book suggests two modalities by which such a system might operate.

Part II of the book focuses on understanding the link between the nature of the reform at stake, the process engaged to achieve reform, and the end result (adoption or non-adoption of reform). The chapter presents the comparison of three bundles of reforms in France, Ireland, and Italy between 2000 and 2015, and formulates propositions about the prediction of the outcomes of reform. The chapter discusses link(s) between antecedent conditions and the likelihood of a given type of reform and process emerging. Next, theoretical propositions centre on the interaction between the nature of the reform (divisive or consensual, depending on the level of support for the reform), and the nature of the process of reform (majoritarian, supermajoritarian, or externalized, depending on the level of inclusion). The chapter explains why the effect of veto players and of multifaceted reforms varies according to the type of reform and type of process chosen.

The Conclusion discusses the contribution of the book on four issues: the description of the reforms of core democratic rules that occurred in Western Europe from 1990 to 2010; the short- and long-term determinants influencing the occurrence of reform; the dynamics of emergence of bundles of reforms; and finally, the link between the nature of the reform at stake, the process of reform, and the final outcome of a given proposal. Drawing from three case studies, the Conclusion presents a typology of six configurations of reform according to their divisive or consensual character and the type of process (majoritarian, supermajoritarian, and externalized). The findings drawn from the Irish, French, and Italian examples can be applied to a much wider set of reforms and countries, including for instance the outcomes of citizen assemblies or current attempts to modify the constitutional design in several Western European countries.