simple language. Announcements were also made on the radio and placed in local newspapers. In addition, meetings were held with community leaders. A follow-up poll revealed that 98% of the city residents knew about the law and 93% supported it.

After the law was implemented, acts of interpersonal violence and police calls for service decreased, and citizen perception of personal safety and community order improved. In 2004, the local university and Pacific Institute (an American NGO) undertook, in cooperation with city officials, an independent evaluation of the new alcohol policy. Fully funded by the Fundação de Apoio à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo, the study showed a reduction in murders and assaults against women, attributable to the implementation of the policy.

This experience brings hope to other communities inAleks Szczerbiak, "Testing Party Models in East-Central
Europe: Local Party Organization in Postcommunist Poland,"
Party Politics, 5 (October 1999), 525-537.

First Paragraph:
There is a burgeoning literature on the political parties
and party systems that have been emerging in Eastern Europe
since the collapse of communism in 1989. Commentators have
tended to focus on the new party systems more external and
visible aspects: their programmatic and ideological
dimensions; the nature and pattern of interactions between
the parties; the sociology of party support and emerging
cleavage structures; and their general contribution to the
process of democratic consolidation (Kitschelt, 1992; Evans
and Whitefield, 1993; Roskin, 1993; Berglund and
Dellenbrant, 1994; Wightman, 1995; Pridham and Lewis, 1996).
Those analysts who have examined internal, structural and
organizational issues have generally hypothesized that the
new parties are likely to be characterized by a weak
grounding in civil society arising from a