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We find similar data in Central and Eastern Europe: in Hungary, for
example, in the last quarter of 2020, 4.7 per cent of the working population was
employed in agriculture, forestry, and fishing; 21.3 per cent in manufacturing;
8.3 per cent in construction; 0.2 per cent in mining and quarrying; while the
remaining 74 per cent was economically active in a variety of private and
public services.’ This general trend of occupational change has generated a
significant political transformation across Europe through the weakening of
the class and rural-urban cleavages and the shaking of previous relatively
homogeneous constituencies for Socialist, Social Democratic, Radical Left,
and Agrarian parties in particular.
Trends have been less linear regarding religiosity and the church-state
cleavage. After a long period of decline, a resurgence in religiosity could be
observed in the late 20" and the early 21‘ century, mainly in post-communist
countries. However, in his latest review, Ronald E Inglehart reports again
about the decline of traditional religions, including in the European continent
(Inglehart 2020). In Kubicek’s reading, though many Europeans do remain
religious, fewer and fewer people attend religious services, and the vast
majority of citizens share the principle of secularism, making it “a cultural
feature of contemporary Europe” (Kubicek 2021, 157) and diminishing
constituency cohesion for Christian Democratic parties in particular.
These developments raise the question of whether we can only talk about
dealignment, or also about realignment in contemporary European politics.
The first is usually defined as voters becoming detached from political parties
and partisan identities —- and often from politics in general, we should add;
while the second means that voters swap their stable allegiance to one party
for an equally stable allegiance to another party (Hopkin 2006, 87).
Realignment is not a new phenomenon in European politics. Its best-known
recent examples are the emergence of the Greens’ political family and New
Left parties along the post-materialist transition in European societies. Some
scholars do see new cleavages rising in European political systems, replacing
those presented by Lipset and Rokkan. Most often they refer to the materialist
vs post-materialist, the winners vs losers of globalisation/Europeanisation,
the cosmopolitan vs nationalist — or, in the concept of David Goodhart: the
Anywheres vs Somewheres* - and the pro-European vs Eurosceptic conflicts
as potential new dividing lines structuring political debates and competition.
However, the increasing diversification of, and individualisation in
European societies make the rise of any new social cleavage much more
difficult than ever before. This individualisation is rooted in a number of
3 Eurostat data, see at https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/lfsq_eisn2/default/
table?lang=en (last accessed on 8 September 2021)
Goodhart describes the “people from Anywhere’ as globalists possessing easily convertible
knowledge and skills, which makes them competitive and mobile worldwide; while the
“people from Somewhere” are localists with stronger community ties and more conservative
social values (Goodhart 2017).