Voting bloc in the context of "Solid coalition"

A political faction is a group of people with a common political purpose, especially a subgroup of a political party that has interests or opinions different from the rest of the political party. Intragroup conflict between factions can lead to schism of the political party into two political parties. The ley de lemas electoral system allows the voters to indicate on the ballot their preference for political factions within a political party. Political factions can represent voting blocs. Political factions require a weaker party discipline. Research indicates that factions can play an important role in moving their host party along the ideological spectrum.

Block or bloc voting refers to a class of electoral systems where multiple candidates are elected simultaneously. They do not guarantee minority representation and allow a group of voters (a voting bloc) to ensure that only their preferred candidates are elected. In these systems, a voter can select as many candidates as there are open seats. That is, the voter has as many votes to cast as the number of seats to fill. The block voting systems are among various election systems available for use in multi-member districts where the voting system allows for the selection of multiple winners at once.

Block voting falls under the multiple non-transferable vote category, a term often used interchangeably with this term. Block voting may be also associated with the concept of winner-take-all representation in multi-winner electoral systems or the plurality election method.

The Solid South was the electoral voting bloc for the Democratic Party in the Southern United States between the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the aftermath of the Compromise of 1877 and the failure of the Lodge Bill of 1890, Southern Democrats disenfranchised nearly all blacks in all the former states of the Confederate States of America during the late 19th century and the early 20th century.

During this period, the Democratic Party controlled southern state legislatures and most local, state and federal officeholders in the South were Democrats. This resulted in a one-party system, in which a candidate's victory in Democratic primary elections was tantamount to election to the office itself. White primaries were another means that the Democrats used to consolidate their political power, excluding blacks from voting.

The United Nations Regional Groups are the geopolitical regional groups of member states of the United Nations. Originally, the UN member states were unofficially organized into five groups as an informal means of sharing the distribution of posts for General Assembly committees. Now this grouping has taken on a much more expansive and official role. Many UN bodies are allocated on the basis of geographical representation. Top leadership positions, including Secretary-General and President of the General Assembly, are rotated among the regional groups. The groups also coordinate substantive policy and form common fronts for negotiations and bloc voting.

In political science and sociology, a cleavage is a historically determined social or cultural line which divides citizens within a society into groups with differing political interests, resulting in political conflict among these groups. Social or cultural cleavages thus become political cleavages once they get politicized as such. Cleavage theory accordingly argues that political cleavages predominantly determine a country's party system as well as the individual voting behavior of citizens, dividing them into voting blocs. These blocs are distinguished by similar socio-economic characteristics, who vote and view the world in a similar way. It is distinct from other common political theories on voting behavior in the sense that it focuses on aggregate and structural patterns instead of individual voting behaviors.

Classical cleavage theories have generally been focused on the persistence of dominant conflicts within national political systems over the course of history. Political sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan (1967) for example used the term in their often cited essay on cleavage structures in West European politics. In their essay, the authors argue how the European party systems at their time of writing were still largely based on the social and cultural cleavages that characterized European societies a century earlier. They therefore argue that these 'frozen party systems' can be seen as political expressions of historically determined societal divisions.