Majorization inequalities have a long history, going back to Maclaurin and Newton. They were recently studied for several families of symmetric functions, including by Cuttler--Greene--Skandera (2011), Sra (2016), Khare--Tao (2021), McSwiggen--Novak (2022), and Chen--Sahi (2024+) among others. Here we extend the inequalities by these authors to Jack and Macdonald polynomials, and obtain conjectural characterizations of majorization and of weak majorization of the underlying partitions. We prove these characterizations for two variables. In fact, we upgrade -- and prove in the above cases -- the characterization of majorization, to containment of Jack and Macdonald differences lying in the Muirhead semiring.