Ah ok, thank you. If I understood correctly, you take "occupy a strong position in the social order" to mean a group's strong enfranchisement and entrenchement,

Ah ok, thank you. If I understood correctly, you take "occupy a strong position in the social order" to mean a group's strong enfranchisement and entrenchement, up to the point of closure within the political culture (in the Almond-Verba technical sense of the term). My only quibble with treating "welfare recipients" as a group is it conflates two quite heterogeneous groups of people: seniors/retirees in one hand, and disabled people plus medicaid/food aid/SCHIP recipients on the other. The former do account for the majority of welfare spending and quite justifiably fit (my understanding of) your definition of "strong position in the social order" in the sense of strong enfranchisement; but the latter hardly do.