ABSTRACT
Groups form political coalitions in order to gain benefits for their members. In a heteroge-neous society, cross-group alliances create an economy of scale that gives each entity more clout. As Rufus Browning, Dale Rogers Marshall, and David Tabb (1984, p. 3) observed in their award-winning book Protest Is Not Enough, this logic is especially applicable to minority groups. According to these authors, African-Americans and Latinos “overcame their exclusion from the political and governmental systems” only when they became major political partners in broader coalitions.
