Role Model Do No HARM: Modeling Achievable Success Inspires Social Belonging and Women’s Candidate Emergence

ABSTRACT Elected women can inspire other women to emerge as candidates, but little research has explored how individual women respond to political role models. Psychology scholarship suggests two factors important to role model influence on career decisions (like candidate emergence). First, role models affect behavior when they seem attainable. Second, motivation is dependent upon a sense of belonging in the social context, which role models may bolster. Because women are underrepresented in politics, a role model may only contribute to political ambition when they project a realistic path for success and inspire a sense of belonging. We test how role model attainability influences women’s political ambition through this need to belong, finding attainable role models (ARMs) compared to high-achieving role models (HARMs) are more likely to inspire women’s political ambition. These effects are mediated by the belonging inspired by role models, which is moderated by how competitive the aspirants are.