Unequal access

The excerpt's central image is a choir singing with a heavy upper-class accent, and it calls the pressure system tilted toward a small, privileged minority. In plain terms, interest groups give the well-off far more voice than everyone else. That is the claim in C.

Groups need money, time and organization to form and lobby, and those resources are unevenly spread. Diffuse interests, the kind shared loosely by many people, are the hardest to organize, which is why the author says the system serves them badly.

Each choice

• A. The author estimates that roughly 90 percent of people are shut out of group politics. Someone who picks this is repeating the pluralist claim the passage rejects.
• B. Conflict and polarization are a common critique of faction, but they are not this author's complaint. His concern is who is excluded, not too much conflict.
• C (correct). Upper-class bias in the group system is exactly what the excerpt describes, so the author would agree that groups over-represent elites.
• D. The excerpt never compares groups with parties. This answer comes from outside knowledge or a guess, not from the passage.