Engaging <i>See Jane Run</i> : Toward a Richer Theory of Political Role Models

Abstract This review article assesses Campbell and Wolbrecht's See Jane Run: How Women Politicians Matter for Young People, a field-defining account of how women's political presence shapes adolescents' stereotypes, democratic attitudes, and engagement. Drawing on a multimethod design—including longitudinal data, data linked to state electoral contexts, oversamples of youth of color, and survey experiments—the authors show that visible women candidates can shift views of women's leadership and, under certain conditions, elevate girls' political efficacy and ambition. Effects are concentrated in adolescence, display notable heterogeneity by race and party, and occasionally provoke backlash among boys; experimental scenarios featuring more Republican women broaden democratic confidence across groups, underscoring the salience of novelty. The review highlights these contributions while pressing a central conceptual tension: the book's influential presence–perception distinction treats perception largely as recall, whereas psychological role model theory emphasizes identification and factors such as attainability. I propose a process model in which presence (structural exposure and novelty) is a precondition that, via attention and relevance, can mature into identification and behavioral activation. The review outlines implications for theory and research—especially clarifying mechanisms, examining mediated and parasocial pathways, attending to intersectional identities and independents, and separating descriptive from symbolic and substantive effects—arguing that integrating presence with identification will yield a more precise, cumulative science of political role models.