Internal political efficacy (IPE) refers to an individual's belief in their ability to understand politics and have a grip on it. This confidence or self-efficacy has been reported to determine political engagement, and civic education scholars have identified the presence of an open classroom climate for discussion as a critical factor contributing to IPE.
Recent empirical research highlights how such an open classroom climate for discussion might contribute to intensifying gender inequality in IPE rather than diminishing it. These puzzling results pose questions about how the school might be a gendered political socialization place that reinforces rather than diminishes gender inequalities in IPE and which school characteristics play a role.
This paper contributes to the discussion by mapping out how progressive and traditional gender role attitudes at both individual and school levels influence the gender gap in IPE. We will investigate whether the interaction effect of an open classroom climate on the gender gap in IPE differs in schools with different types of school cultures defined in terms of supporting progressive or conservative gender roles. Using multilevel modeling on a representative sample of grade 12 students in Flanders-Belgium (3898 students across 150 schools), we test the impact of school cultures on the presence (or absence) of an open classroom climate for girls and how this contributes to the gender gap in IPE.
Our preliminary results suggest the openness of school culture is positively associated with more progressive gender role attitudes, especially for male students. Furthermore, in schools with a more conservative gendered school context, an open classroom climate intensifies the gender gap in IPE, whereas this is not the case in schools with a progressive gender school culture. This indicates that attention needs to be paid to collective perception and school culture processes to promote gender equality within schools further.
