Abstract
In this article, we investigate the impact of religious involvement on voting preference for the Christian Democratic party in Belgium. Although religious involvement is declining in Western European democracies, there is still significant evidence for the influence of religion on voting behaviour. We examine the relationship between individual religiosity, community religious involvement and vote preference for the Christian Democratic party in Belgium in 2009. The results show that a Catholic denomination is the most important predictor for vote preference for the Christian Democratic party, followed by church practice. The multilevel analysis demonstrates that this effect can be observed not just at the individual level, but also at the community level as inhabitants of communities with high levels of church practice are more likely to vote for the Christian Democratic party, even controlling for their own religious background and behaviour. Religion still plays a role in determining voting preferences, with the religious effect occurring simultaneously at the individual and the community level, although it is clear that the effect is much stronger at the individual level.
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Notes
It has to be remembered that Belgium has two linguistically segregated party systems (Deschouwer, 2009). The Dutch language Christian Democratic party only competes in the Dutch-speaking region of the country; the French language Christian Democratic party only competes in the French-speaking region of the country. In the June 2010 federal elections, the Dutch language Christian Democrats suffered a rather substantial loss, but these elections can be considered as highly exceptional given the success of the Flemish nationalist party.
Data are valid only for the Roman Catholic Church of Belgium. Traditionally, however, Belgium has predominantly been a Catholic country, since it was re-conquered by the Spanish army in 1585, following the Protestant uprising in the region that is now known as Belgium. In the current era, the Catholicism remains by far the most important religion. Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Orthodox and Anglican churches are present, but jointly they reach no more than 6 per cent of the total population.
In a number of countries, this is often referred to as ‘membership’ of a specific denomination. The notion of ‘membership’, however, is not used in the Belgian Catholic Church, and therefore, it does not make sense to include such a measurement in a population survey.
Other cut-off points for religious participation were also considered, but these did not lead to substantially different results.
In this procedure developed by the OECD, a decreasing weight to every additional member of the household, living from the same family income is added, in order to make income comparable across persons: 1.0 for the first adult, 0.5 for other persons aged 14 or above, and 0.3 for children below this age. The family income is thus divided by the number of ‘effective’ family members.
We also included the interaction effect of religious denomination and religious behaving, but since there was no significant effect, we did not report it in this article.
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Appendix
The current analysis is based on the Social Cohesion Indicators in Flanders survey. This survey is based on a representative sample of respondents in the autonomous region of Flanders between 18 and 85 years old. In total, 2,080 face-to-face interviews were held during Spring 2009.
The survey is based on a two-stage cluster sampling. First, groups of communities were identified that differ minimally within and maximally between groups. This cluster analysis was performed using indicators such as population density and population mobility, industrial production, economic performance and demographic indicators. Within the resulting clusters, 40 communities were randomly drawn, with their selection chances dependent on population size. This procedure was used to ensure a sufficient variation of relevant indicators on the community level. Local communities on average have 17,000 inhabitants in Belgium and they have some local authority on matters of redistribution and police policy (Ashworth and Heyndels, 2006).
In a second phase, a simple random sample of inhabitants born between 1924 and 1991, living in the selected communities, was drawn from the official national registry (including both Belgian citizens and foreign nationals). Overall, the survey obtained a response rate of 54 percent, which can be considered as average for this kind of research in a Belgian context. A response analysis indicated that respondents were representative for the population of these 40 communities, with no significant differences between the sample and the population with regard to age and gender. The resulting dataset, in sum, includes information on 2,080 respondents, nested in 40 distinct communities (Hooghe et al, 2009).
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Botterman, S., Hooghe, M. Religion and voting behaviour in Belgium: An analysis of the relation between religious beliefs and Christian Democratic voting. Acta Polit 47, 1–17 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2011.11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2011.11