What role does the international diffusion of gender norms play in determining recent increases in women's political representation? We argue that norm diffusion has larger positive effects on women's cabinet representation than on women's legislative representation. We also show that within cabinets, norm diffusion affects low-prestige appointments more than highprestige appointments. We test these arguments using an original database of ministers from 1979 to 2009 and find that the association of women's representation with three separate indicators of international diffusionlevels of women's representation among neighboring states, levels of women's representation among intergovernmental organization partners, and time since ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women-is consistent with our arguments.Women make up more than 50% of the world's population, but they are dramatically underrepresented in the world's most powerful decisionmaking bodies. In 2011, 19.3% of the world's national legislators and 16.0% of the world's cabinet ministers were women. Still, women have recently made substantial gains. Levels of women's representation moved sharply upward beginning in the 1990s (see Figure 1). The number of countries with all-male cabinets declined steadily.What factors explain the recent, relatively rapid global rise in the ranks of women political leaders? To date, scholars have focused on domestic sources of variation, calling attention to the roles of social structural, ideological, and political variables. Yet, the increasing visibility of international commitments to gender-balanced decision making and the coincident sudden upward ticks in women's representation suggest that international factors may also be affecting national outcomes. This article investigates the extent to which states' international interactions have propelled women's gains.While political scientists (Krook and True 2012) and sociologists (Paxton, Hughes, and Green 2006) have examined the evolution of a norm

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Do east-central European bureaucrats more resemble their socialist-era predecessors or their member-state counterparts? Are socialist patterns persisting, or are we witnessing isomorphism toward a European Administrative Space (EAS)? Or both? I examine these questions through the Czech and Slovak cases. I begin by contrasting two ideal types: state-socialist administrative space and EAS. I present evidence from a survey of 296 Czech and Slovak managers and argue that Czech and Slovak administrations occupy interstices between state-socialist and European ideals. Although there is some evidence of convergence, Czech and Slovak administrations operate in spaces considerably distant from the EAS.