These words refer to a loose grouping of like-minded people within a larger aggregate. Faction suggests a relatively small grouping that coheres because of attitudes or objectives that are different from that of others in the larger whole. A faction , by implication, is more concerned with winning acceptance for its views than for the welfare or effectiveness of the parent group; rather than compromise these views a faction might leave the parent body and form a rival group. Thus, the word may have pejorative connotations ranging from stubbornness, disharmony, to outright disloyalty: He begged them to set party unity above the bickering of factions . A splinter group is an even more cohesive and well-defined unit that has broken away from the larger parent group, or is about to do so, usually because of doctrinal disagreement; it may be of doubtful stability or endurance: splinter groups that sided with their party on the main issue but against it on several smaller ones; a movement that was destroyed by its tendency to break into splinter groups . Sect is used primarily of religious groups that adhere to their own special doctrines and either remain loosely associated with a larger group or break away from it completely: the formation of a number of Protestant sects . The word may also be used for any identifiable groupings within a dogmatic aggregate: Maoist sects at work within de-Stalinized countries.

Bloc and wing refer to far larger groupings than the previous words. Both also refer to much looser allegiances. Wing , however, need not suggest actual membership in some organized parent group so much as a definable position within a spectrum of possibility: a rare agreement between the left and right wings of the country’s political sentiment; disclosures that should be satisfying to gadflies of the right wing . More strictly, the word can apply within an organized group, but still with the idea of an extreme position on that group’s scale of values: co-operation between the left wing of the Conservative Party and the right wing of the Labour Party in Britain. One could not, obviously, refer to middle-ground sentiment by using this word. Bloc is not restricted, like wing , to suggesting simple polarization along a scale of values. It refers to a practical alliance of strength and consequently need not stress ideological intransigence at all: a power bloc made up of several political shadings. The word suggests a joining of forces fostered by threatened security, rivalry and the will to survive: African delegates that vote as a bloc in the U.N. Assembly. The word is sometimes like wing , however, in suggesting no parent group that overarches rival blocs : the neutralist bloc of nations; the rival power blocs of East and West.