ABSTRACT
Politics is involved in compensation more than in any other dimension of publicpersonnel management. Citizens and the officials they elect relate to compensation issues more easily than others. Members of the public have a difficult time tracing their tax payments to submarines, nursing homes, and prisons. They have almost no problem, however, conceptualizing how their taxes become the income of a government official. The annual raises of public employees as a whole and the specific salaries of individual top officials are visible and often controversial. Inside government, employees are very concerned about how much they make, how much others make, and what political and personal games need to be played in order to get wage increases.
