Adam Harmes’s review offers a clear and concise summary of several core claims and themes in Voluntary Disruptions. It also poses three questions about the book, which I answer here before closing with some thoughts about post-publication developments in the real and theoretical worlds.

First, is the legitimacy claims causal mechanism unique to international soft law? No. Our theoretical objective is to persuade scholars to broaden the way they think about soft law: treat it, we proffer, akin to the way historical institutionalists treat domestic institutions. That means expecting soft law to produce temporal effects of the kind we specify. Once international soft law is in place, policy entrepreneurs are likely to draw from its perceived legitimacy (or illegitimacy) to achieve their goals. Although the book focuses on soft law, it is not the only potential international source of legitimacy. However, soft law’s characteristics tend to lend themselves to claims (about being neutral, expert-created, and technically robust) different from those made about treaties, international hard law in general, and other potential “validators.”

Second, can more be said about the scope conditions? We identify two obvious ones in our cases: the presence of international soft law and policy contestation sufficient to encourage contending actors to look for additional political resources and opportunities. The selection of cases (from the North Atlantic and finance) reflects our effort to balance problem solving and theoretical aims. We followed the internal logic of the three empirical studies (chapters 4–6), each needing cases appropriate for its own methodological mix of small-n comparisons, congruence analysis, and process tracing. Future research involving cases beyond finance in the North Atlantic corridor could well reveal subtler conditions. Even if it does, I believe we were overly cautious about the explanatory reach of our causal mechanisms. Both of the identified conditions are common. In finance, competing factions are a mainstay, evident in Japan and China (our two supporting background cases, pp. 92–95), as well as throughout other parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (see, for instance, Emily Jones, ed., The Political Economy of Bank Regulation in Developing Countries: Risk and Reputation, 2020). We used labor and environment cases as nonfinancial instances where both conditions obtain (pp. 164–67), but we could have picked from a long list of others.

Third, is international soft law biased (for example, favoring conservatives over progressives) or does framing (and therefore ideas and ideology) at least partially determine winners and losers? Voluntary Disruptions does not directly address inherent biases in international soft law’s content. We do, however, argue (the arena expansion mechanism) that mobile and well-resourced actors are relatively better positioned to influence it. In finance, some firms and industries have these characteristics but so too do government agencies, which often have separate reasons for creating and using international arenas (chapter 3). In nonfinancial domains, civil society advocacy organizations are frequently mobile and well resourced. As for the legitimacy claims mechanism, framing is indeed central. Policy entrepreneurs do not merely draw on extant perceptions of soft law’s legitimacy or illegitimacy but also forge them. One activist may seek to legitimize and another to delegitimize the very same soft law (pp. 156–57).

Since its release, Voluntary Disruptions’ real-world questions and answers have taken on greater significance. Chapter 4 on the EU’s adoption of US-like financial regulation is part of a recent revision of Europe’s role in the great financial crisis (see BIS publications on the topic) and ought to give pause to anyone contemplating Brussels’s future financial regulatory role as the international political economy enters a new phase. Likewise, the empirics in chapter 6 help explain the continued US support of global finance despite the nationalist turn in trade policy.

It has also become increasingly clear that “third wave” IPE theory is maturing and that Voluntary Disruptions—attentive to temporality, endogeneity, and causal processes that defy domestic, regional, or international categorization; imply epistemological holism; and display non-ergodicity (Thomas Oatley, “Toward a Political Economy of Complex Interdependence,” European Journal of International Relations 25 (4), 2019)—fits squarely within it.