The degree of swelling (S) of crosslinked polymers depends on several variables whose individual contributions are difficult to be distinguished. The aim of this work is to determine the contributions of the morphology to S, discriminating them from the effect of the crosslinking density. Under usual conditions of synthesis, these two characteristics vary simultaneously but here, several samples of chemically crosslinked poly(N-vinylimidazole) having the same permanent crosslinking density (determined by DSC) and different porous morphologies (determined by SEM) were prepared. It was thus found that the variation of S with porosity, keeping constant the rest of variables, is strongly solvent dependent. Swelling in methanol is almost constant whereas for ethanol, deionized water, and aqueous HCl solutions, S depends on morphological features in a different way for each medium. It was concluded that S increases with inherent porosity and solvent effects a-rise from the counterbalance of such increment with the dependence of the polymer-solvent interaction parameter on the polymer volume fraction. (C) 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 112: 1579-1586, 2009