In this research note, we reexamine these quota campaigns and find that, despite important similarities, processes of quota adoption diverge significantly across the two cases. While the reserved seats policy in Afghanistan was primarily driven by the top–down efforts of the United Nations (UN), the leg- islative quota in Iraq emerged mainly through the bottom–up mobilization of women’s groups. We draw on these differences to elaborate the intuition that quotas may spread globally through multiple processes of diffusion.