According to Merriam-Webster, inequality is defined as an unfair situation in which some people have more rights or better opportunities than other people. In Paul Frymer book Uneasy Alliance, he shows inequality among race and parties is still seen in America democracy today. He demonstrates to his readers that not all groups are treated equally but more government officials are more responsive to white swing voters than any other voter. Frymer’s theory affirms this ideas that in American politics, African American are captured minority. For Frymer’s a captured minority is when both political parties attempt to allure more white swing votes by absenting themselves for black voters leaving black with no other …show more content…
The two party system is very generalizable in the case of inequality when it comes to Frymer’s theory and Bartel’s findings. The idea behind the two party systems was to create a competition that would provide representation for a variety of groups, no matter their advantages or disadvantages in politics. Recently, the two party systems have shown to exclude some groups and treat them as invisible. These two party system tries to capture certain groups. The author Paul Frymer establishes African Americans as the captured group, while for Larry Bartels the captured group would be the poor; therefore the authors expressed some major concerns for both groups. First, captured groups often find their political interested neglected by their own party leaders because limited political choices. This two party system provides struggle for change, takes out the diversity of ideologies and limits ideology to two. Paul Frymer implies, “African Americans are need of policies and programs not easily provided by a government that favors an incrementalist approach to politics” (9). Bartels debates, that the political systems does not honor the public opinion or …show more content…
There are two empirical results that Bartels observes about the poor to support Frymer’s theory. The first piece of evidence to support this is campaign contribution. Bartel’s findings shed light on the fact that Senators are six times as likely to respond to the views of typically affluent constituents as well as middle constituents rather than have no contact in regard to the views of low income constituents (Bartels 280). These captured groups are at a huge disadvantage, according to Frymers, in getting social or economic issues passed because minorities ideologically hardly agree with white swing voters. These outcomes have a major consequence because the government is making it accessible to stop political action that might benefit captured groups rather than fulfilling these specific policies. One way this is done is by high income constituents using abundant amounts of contribution to override minorities. The second piece of evidence to support this claim is the responsiveness neither party’s gives to captured groups. Bartels argues “the preferences of people in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent impacts on the behavior of their elected officials” (Bartels 285). Paul Frymer’s theory would agree to Bartels empirical results because captured