ABSTRACT
For more than one hundred years local governments have received a combination of recommendations and mandates from the federal government, state agencies, courts, professional associations, and academicians for the implementation of proper personnel practices. The thrust of the suggested or required human resource policies has been portrayed to various degrees either as a unidimensional progression from the spoils system to the merit system, with professional standards slowly supplanting political considerations, or as a multidimensional field of four or more competing personnel systems, with the spoils system, merit system, collective bargaining system, and affirmative action system all vying for preeminence. Although both assumptions pervade the personnel literature, neither have been subjected to rigorous statistical analysis. Instead, the evidence regarding each model consists largely of conceptual analyses, case studies, and simple descriptive computations (Cayer 1991; Fox 1993).1
