Political partisanship in Europe has undergone a significant and multifaceted transformation in recent decades. The importance of long-term party predispositions for electoral choice and cleavage-based appeals has been declining in last decades, resulting, inter alia, in the growing importance of issue-based voting, but also in increasing party system fragmentation and political polarisation. This paper provides a systematic and theory-grounded discussion on the recent development of identities and political cleavages, and the consequences of this development on political polarisation and party politics, specifically stressing political trust as the measure strongly related with the political polarisation and thus also with the (post)modern party politics. To this point, the paper reflects the family of neo-modernization theories prioritizing economic/rational choice nature of polarisation. These theories are framed in response to globalization, economic and cultural change, the collapse of communism, and decline of labour-centred left politics, and explicitly link the changes in the structure of society in Western democracies with cultural change, i.e. values, and reflect the fundamental change associated with the weakening of the link between the working class and left-wing politics. The paper concludes that the process under study has been rather evolutionary over the last seventy years, with psychology based on both (dis)trust between members of different social groups and distrust in political institutions plays a significant role in the polarisation of contemporary societies.