Who perceives the classroom as closing? A distributional analysis of Open Classroom Climate in ICCS 2009–2022

<title>Abstract</title> <p>Background. Public debates in many democracies suggest that classrooms are becoming less open spaces for political discussion. Systematic empirical evidence for this claim, however, remains scarce. This study examines trends in perceived Open Classroom Climate (OCC) across three ICCS waves, asking not only whether average openness has changed, but also which students are most likely to report very low perceived openness and under what school conditions such perceptions emerge. Methods. Drawing on pooled repeated cross-sectional data from 13 countries and approximately 139,000 students across ICCS 2009, 2016, and 2022, we apply distributional descriptive analyses, quantile regressions, and multilevel logistic models predicting membership in the bottom decile of perceived classroom openness. Results. Mean levels of OCC remained broadly stable across waves, while the share of students reporting very low perceived openness increased, especially by 2022 and particularly for teacher-related openness. Low perceived openness is systematically associated with less egalitarian gender-role orientations, lower institutional trust, and weaker support for immigrant rights. School-level relational climate and participatory school experiences are associated with lower probabilities of very low perceived openness, and relational climate moderates how strongly gender-role orientations translate into perceptions of discursive closure. Conclusions. The findings support a fragmentation rather than a generalized decline interpretation and advance a distributional perspective on OCC as a politically structured educational outcome. For civic education practice, the results underscore that sustaining open classroom discourse requires attention not only to discussion formats, but to the relational and participatory conditions under which disagreement remains communicatively manageable.</p>