Bureaucratic partisanship

With the admission by the IRS that it targeted Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny in their petitions for tax-exempt status and put red tape in their way to bog down their operations in the headlines, I thought it'd be a nice time to take a look at the party affiliations of  government (federal, state, and local) employees and compare them to the affiliations of the rest of the country that has yet to heed the Derb's advice. The following table shows the party affiliation distribution among those who work or have worked for the government and those who have not. For contemporary relevance and valid comparisons, only responses of those of working aged (18-65) who were surveyed between 2010-2012 are included (n = 3,144):

Party	Gov't	Private
Democrat	37.6%	30.3%
Independent	33.1%	44.8%
Republican	27.5%	22.1%
Third party	1.9%	2.7%

Government employees are more politically committed at both ends of the spectrum, which shouldn't come as that big of a surprise since their jobs are inextricably connected to politics in one way or another. Unfortunately we can't turn the tables and isolate IRS employees for particularly close scrutinizing, but I suspect that those whose jobs rely upon the collection of tax revenues are going to be more negatively predisposed towards groups supporting reduction in the taxing (and spending) power of leviathan than other people--and even other government employees--tend to be.

GSS variables used: YEAR(2010-2012), WRKGOVT, PARTYID(0-1)(2-4)(5-6)(7), AGE(18-65)