What about giving them a high potential but making their actual salary a function of approval rating? In order to maximize how much you make you have to work to unify your constituents.
I don't think you'd want this to be linear either. My feeling is you'd want the pay to stay pretty low anywhere below a 50% support level and climb pretty steeply above that, which discourages the split people down the middle mess the US is in. You'd probably accept that a small portion of people are nutcases so the salary would approach the max at around 85-90% support.
There are some potential exploits that you'd have to try to address but it's a thought.
How do you determine approval rating? The reality is that only a small percentage of the public has any idea of whom any public servant is outside of their leader.
And at that point it's easily gamed, and leads to ineffective short termist planning by the public servant.
This is a terrible idea that would be hugely damaging to the public.
I don't think you'd want this to be linear either. My feeling is you'd want the pay to stay pretty low anywhere below a 50% support level and climb pretty steeply above that, which discourages the split people down the middle mess the US is in. You'd probably accept that a small portion of people are nutcases so the salary would approach the max at around 85-90% support.
There are some potential exploits that you'd have to try to address but it's a thought.