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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. Adapted from the source document.

Traditional sociological insights assume that cities are characterized by lower levels of voluntary engagement as it is expected that community size and population density are negatively associated with network and mobilization opportunities. Others, however, argue that cities allow for the formation of different networks that are no longer based on ascribed personal characteristics. The authors analyze voluntary association membership in Belgium, based on the "Social Cohesion Indicators in Flanders" dataset ( n = 2,080 respondents, sampled in 40 communities). The analysis shows that neither population density nor community size have an effect on scope or intensity of participation in voluntary associations. Only two forms of associations are negatively related to population density. Their results therefore do not support the hypothesis of a rural-urban divide in participation in voluntary associations. They speculate how future research could take into account different sorts of voluntary associations when investigating the rural-urban divide and include other measurements of participation.