Legislative professionalism has played a prominent role in state politics research for decades. Despite the attention paid to its causes and consequences, recent research has largely set aside questions about professionalism's conceptualization and operationalization. Usually measuring it as an aggregate index, scholars theoretically and empirically treat professionalism as a unidimensional concept. In this article, we argue that exclusive use of aggregate indices can limit state politics research. Using a new dataset with almost 40 years of data on state legislative resources, salary, and session length, we reconsider the validity of using an index to study professionalism across the states. We evaluate the internal consistency of professionalism components over time, the relationship between components and the Squire Index, and the degree to which professionalism components are unidimensional using classical multidimensional scaling. We find enough commonality and enough variation between professionalism components to support a range of measurement strategies like the use of unidimensional indices (such as the Squire Index), disaggregating the components and analyzing their effects individually, or formulating multidimensional measures. Scholars should take care to choose the appropriate measure of the concept that best fits the causal relationships under examination. Legislative professionalism has occupied a central place in the study of state politics for over four decades. Few concepts in the field have received as much attention as the transformation of some state legislatures from "horse and buggy, 18th century anachronisms" (Mooney 1995, 47) to institutions of high capacity, equipped with financial resources and staff, full-time sessions, and attractive legislative compensation packages. The utility of legislative professionalism for the study of state politics is unquestionable; the process has been associated with a wide range of political outcomes including the degree and quality of legislative representation, public opinions about the legislature, state government spending, and various aspects of legislative careers, to mention only a few effects of the process (e.g.

High precision cosmological distance measurements towards individual objects such as time delay gravitational lenses or type Ia supernovae are affected by weak lensing perturbations by galaxies and groups along the line of sight. In time delay gravitational lenses, "external convergence," κ ext , can dominate the uncertainty in the inferred distances and hence cosmological parameters. In this paper we attempt to reconstruct κ ext , due to line of sight structure, using a simple halo model. We use mock catalogues from the Millennium Simulation, and calibrate and compare our reconstructed P(κ ext ) to ray-traced κ ext "truth" values; taking into account realistic uncertainties on redshift and stellar masses. We find that the reconstruction of κ ext provides an improvement in precision of ∼50% over galaxy number counts. We find that the lowest-κ ext lines of sight have the best constrained P(κ ext ). In anticipation of future samples with thousands of lenses, we find that selecting the third of the systems with the highest precision κ ext estimates gives a sub-sample of unbiased time delay distance measurements with (on average) just 1% uncertainty due to line of sight external convergence effects. Photometric data alone are sufficient to pre-select the best-constrained lines of sight, and can be done before investment in light-curve monitoring. Conversely, we show that selecting lines of sight with high external shear could, with the reconstruction model presented here, induce biases of up to 1% in time delay distance. We find that a major potential source of systematic error is uncertainty in the high mass end of the stellar mass-halo mass relation; this could introduce ∼2% biases on the time-delay distance if completely ignored. We suggest areas for the improvement of this general analysis framework (including more sophisticated treatment of high mass structures) that should allow yet more accurate cosmological inferences to be made.

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Parties’ parliamentary delegations contain a multitude of interests. While scholars suspect that this variation affects party behaviour, most work on parties’ policy statements treats parties as unitary actors. This reflects the absence of strong expectations concerning when (and how) the parliamentary caucus matters for platform construction, as well as the difficulties inherent in testing such claims. Drawing on the literature on women's descriptive representation, this article argues that the makeup of the parliamentary party likely has important consequences for issue entrepreneurship, the scope of issues represented on the manifesto and even the left‐right position of election platforms. With the most comprehensive party‐level study of women's representation ever conducted, three diversity hypotheses are tested using data on the gender makeup of parties’ parliamentary delegations and the content of their manifestos for 110 parties in 20 democracies between 1952 and 2011. The analyses show that as the percentage of women in the parliamentary party increases, parties address a greater diversity of issues in their election campaigns. Women's presence is also associated with more left‐leaning manifestos, even when controlling for parties’ prior ideological positions. Together, these findings illustrate a previously overlooked consequence of descriptive representation and provide a framework for understanding when and why the parliamentary party influences manifesto formation. They show that diversity – or lack thereof – has important consequences for parties’ policy statements, and thus the overall quality of representation.

Theories often explain intraparty competition based on electoral conditions and intraparty rules. This article further opens this black box by considering intraparty statements of preferences. In particular, it predicts that intraparty preference heterogeneity increases after electoral losses, but that candidates deviating from the party's median receive fewer intraparty votes. Party members grant candidates greater leeway to accommodate competing policy demands when in government. The study tests the hypotheses using a new database of party congress speeches from Germany and France, and uses automated text classification to estimate speakers' relative preferences. The results demonstrate that speeches at party meetings provide valuable insights into actors' preferences and intraparty politics. The article finds evidence of a complex relationship between the governing context, the economy and intraparty disagreement.Theories of party politics often make strong assumptions about the relationship between parties' behavior and the preferences of intraparty actors. For example, scholars frequently assume that parties act as if they are unitary actors, and that the party leader represents the median preferences of the party's membership. Despite substantial theoretical development and a number of detailed case studies, few cross-national analyses of intraparty politics consider the role of intraparty preferences. 1This absence is striking. Intraparty politics and party preferences hold implications for a large range of political processes such as election campaigns, legislative politics and coalition governance. 2Building on these studies, we develop a theory of intraparty preferences and party leader selection by considering experiences in government and intraparty electoral rules. Broadly, we theorize that a party's electoral context influences its internal preference diversity. We then argue that candidates' statements of preferences influence their intraparty electoral success. Candidates who express preferences closer to the party's ideological center attract more votes than more extreme candidates.To empirically test hypotheses from our theory, we create a new dataset of intraparty actor preferences from their statements at party national congresses. By focusing on speeches at intraparty meetings, we begin to break open the black box of intraparty politics. Despite evidence that parties act as if they are internally divided in parliament, few studies seek to directly, quantitatively analyze actors' preferences outside this arena.3 Historically, intraparty actors' preferences have proven complicated to measure. Limited data has created a major hurdle in testing theories of intraparty politics. Like recent research studying political