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All citizens shall have equal rights and equal duties. Men and women shall have equal status in the family, at work and in public activity. The society of the working people shall ensure the equality of all citizens by creating equal possibilities and equal opportunities in all fields of public life.ČSSR Constitution, Article 20When we Communist women protested against the disbanding of the women's organization, we were informed that we had equality. That we were equal, happy, joyful, and content, and that, therefore, our problem was solved.Woman Delegate to the Prague Conferenceof District Party Officials, May 1968When Communist elites came to power in Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War, they attempted to create a new social and political order. As part of this process, efforts were made to improve the status of women and to incorporate them as full participants in a socialist society.

"From 1998 to 2005, six elections took place in postcommunist Europe and Eurasia that had the surprising outcome of empowering the opposition and defeating authoritarian incumbents or their designated successors. Valerie J. Bunce and Sharon L. Wolchik compare these unexpected electoral breakthroughs with one another and with elections that had the more typical result of maintaining authoritarian rule. They draw three conclusions. First, the opposition was victorious because of the hard and creative work of a transnational network composed of local opposition and civil society groups, members of the international democracy assistance community, and graduates of successful electoral challenges to authoritarian rule in other countries. Second, the remarkable run of these upset elections reflected the ability of this network to diffuse an ensemble of innovative electoral strategies across state boundaries. Finally, elections can serve as a powerful mechanism for democratic change. This is especially the case when civil society is strong, the transfer of political power is through constitutional means, and opposition leaders win with small mandates"--

From 1998 to 2005, six elections took place in postcommunist Europe that had the surprising outcome of empowering the opposition and defeating authoritarian incumbents or their designated successors. Valerie J. Bunce and Sharon L. Wolchik compare these unexpected electoral breakthroughs. They draw three conclusions. First, the opposition was victorious because of the hard and creative work of a transnational network composed of local opposition and civil society groups, members of the international democracy assistance community and graduates of successful electoral challenges to authoritarian rule in other countries. Second, the remarkable run of these upset elections reflected the ability of this network to diffuse an ensemble of innovative electoral strategies across state boundaries. Finally, elections can serve as a powerful mechanism for democratic change. This is especially the case when civil society is strong, the transfer of political power is through constitutional means, and opposition leaders win with small mandates

Based on their quantitative survey of democracy protests from 1989 to 2011, Dawn Brancati and Adrian Lucardi conclude that diffusion of such protests is the exception, not the rule; that domestic factors rather than international diffusion are key in determining if diffusion occurs and that their findings call into serious question the received wisdom about democratic diffusion. We have several problems with their analysis. First, no serious scholar of diffusion has claimed that the diffusion of subversive innovations supporting democracy is common or frequent, given the difficulties involved. Their conclusion that such diffusion is not common thus echoes, rather than challenges those of many scholars of diffusion. Second, their conclusion that domestic factors are primary in rejecting or sometimes supporting democratic change is also unsurprising. Virtually every empirical account and every theory of cross-national diffusion identify variation in domestic receptivity to change as a key element in determining if diffusion occurs, and its limits. Finally, we question the authors' decision to limit their analysis of diffusion to protests. Innovative challenges to authoritarian rule have taken many additional forms, including roundtables and legal challenges, as well as voter registration and get out the vote drives, agreements among opposition parties, work by civil society organizations, and participation in transnational networks of democracy activists, in addition to protests. Democracy protests are in fact a small and perhaps unrepresentative part of challenges to authoritarian rule; they are likely the result of a series of innovative actions that are hard to quantify and hard to trace, and for this reason are missing from Brancatii and Lucardi's analysis. Their analysis, therefore, does not challenge the accepted wisdom on diffusion, but, in fact, lends partial support to its conclusions, support that is limited by the kinds of data collected and the authors' understanding of both innovation and diffusion.

What explains electoral stability and change in competitive authoritarian regimes? This article addresses the question by comparing eleven elections-six of which led to continuity in authoritarian rule and five of which led to the victory of the opposition-that took place between 1998 and 2008 in competitive authoritarian regimes countries located in the postcommunist region. Using interviews conducted with participants in all of these elections and other types of data and constructing a research design that allowed the authors to match these two sets of elections on a number of important dimensions, they assess two groups of hypotheses-those that highlight institutional, structural, and historical aspects of regime and opposition strength on the eve of these elections and others that highlight characteristics of the elections themselves. The authors conclude that the key difference was whether the opposition adopted a tool kit of novel and sophisticated electoral strategies that made them more popular and effective challengers to the regime. (World Politics / SWP)

From 1996 to 2005 a wave of electoral revolutions swept through east Central Europe, the Balkans, and Soviet successor states. The success of these revolutions and their concentration in the post-communist world reflect favorable political and social conditions, as well as the fact that the common structures and policies of communist regimes created unusually good conditions for diffusion of the electoral model after communism's end. These structural conditions led international donors to concentrate democracy assistance in this region. Efforts to support electoral revolutions in countries with less supportive conditions and less favorable attitudes toward the West and democracy are likely to be more problematic