In the current politicized context around Islam research pops up like mushrooms however little systematic research is available on how religious beliefs are related to voting behaviour of Muslims (Cesari, 2014; Just et al, 2014). This is a gap in the literature given that Muslim candidates seem to be popular among the increasing number of Muslim voters in Western societies. Yet paradoxically, in secularized West-European democracies, religion is no longer considered to be a viable political factor to explain ‘conventional’ political behaviour, maybe this assessment misperceives the role of religious beliefs for Muslim voters. This contribution explores to what extent candidate religion influences vote choice in terms of preferential votes. We test whether religious voter-candidate similarities play a role in the decision-making process of citizens when casting preferential votes. We use data of a recent exit poll related to the local elections of 2018 in Belgium, especially at oversampled locations, which provides us with unique and reliable data regarding religious voting of Muslims. In the local elections of 2014 in Brussels, 1 out of 5 elected representatives had a Muslim background and Mahinur Ozdemir – a veiled women - even made it to the Brussels parliament (Zibouh, 2011). Due to the compulsory and multiple preferential PR-voting system in Belgium, we can gather rare insights about the religious factor in the political participation of Muslims. To achieve this, voter and candidate characteristics are modelled simultaneously in a cross-classified multilevel analyses. This enables an investigation of the decision-making process of Muslim voters (the demand side) while taking into account the list composition in terms of individual candidates (the supply side).
