… is from pages 23-24 of my late colleague Gordon Tullock’s 1987 essay “Public Choice,” the original of which appeared in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, and is reprinted in Virginia Political Economy, which is Vol. 1 of The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock (Charles K. Rowley, ed., 2004) (footnotes deleted):
Furthermore, empirical evidence shows they [government bureaucrats] vote more frequently than non-bureaucrats. Thus their percentage in the voting population is somewhat larger than their percentage in the actual population. Thus, the political superior must consider the people working for him as in part his employers rather than his employees. He may not be able to fire them, but in the mass they can fire him. Altogether, the system is not well designed and does not work very well.
(The empirical evidence to which Gordon refers is found in a 1983 paper by my colleague Jim Bennett and Bill Orzechowski, “The Voting Behavior of Bureaucrats: Some Empirical Evidence,” Public Choice, Vol. 41, pp. 271-284.)
