T HE TERM is one which occurs with considerable frequency in the literature of politics, and references to specific factions and to factionalism in a wide variety of contexts are common. Despite commonplace allusion to faction, however, this realm of politics has been only poorly developed as a category of inquiry and analysis in political science. This is especially true in the context of the enormous body of literature devoted to phenomena of organization and competition for power, where by far the largest share of attention has gone to political parties, and after parties to interest groups. Yet factions are a prominent feature of the political arena, and their predominance in at least a few national political systems makes development of factions study a matter of considerable importance. This article is an attempt to begin just such a development: our purposes here are to survey a broad and, we hope, representative sample of extant writings on factions, and to characterize their approaches and analyses of faction politics. In addition, we shall precede our survey with a brief detailing of the inadequate aspects of the study of factions in political science, and we shall conclude by briefly setting forth some directions for future development of the study of factions as a field of inquiry valuable to students of parties specifically and of politics in general.
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Belloni et al. (1976) studied this question.