We elect others to make decisions we can make ourselves. We do this because it is too much to ask citizens to put in the time and effort necessary to make sound choices on every policy issue we confront. So we choose others to choose on our behalf.

		Mark DeSantis is a management consultant and adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University. A former staff member of the late Sen. John Heinz, he heads Citizens for Democratic Reform, which seeks to reduce the number of county row offices.

Therein lies the virtue and vice of representative democracy: It does not make everyone happy all the time. It does, however, make most of us generally satisfied most of the time.

Democracy may not be efficient, but it is usually effective.

Yet sometimes representative democracy can lose its effectiveness. Corrosive forces outside the political process can be the main cause with the biggest among them being money. Democracy can also falter from within, as when a few public officials lose their way. It starts when the elected and appointed take their status and authority for granted.

Suddenly a space opens up between our public guardians and the rest of us who vested them with our wealth, faith and trust. The final and inevitable step in this process of decay is the most powerful of these men and women join in an implicit conspiracy, one that ultimately ravages the public trust.

Unfortunately, most of this nonsense is invisible to you and me. In politics, conspiracies of public officials are always preceded by an uncharacteristic quiet. This reminds me of when my parents monitored the basement door while I had my friends over from high school. It wasn't loud music or a ruckus that gave my mother concern about what was happening on the other side of the door. It was any stretch of quiet that rightly drew Mom and Dad's close attention.

We Pennsylvanians recently found ourselves on the other side of the door while a silent and bipartisan conspiracy of public officials unfolded in the form of a controversial, self-awarded pay raise that can be collected immediately as "unvouchered expenses." The public outrage this caused is not solely due to this unconscionable act but to an accumulated frustration over a woefully long list of violations of the public trust such as the Legislature's $130 million slush fund. The only constructive way for Pennsylvanians to channel their anger right now is to wait for Election Day and fix the problem one politician at a time.

When things are going well in a democracy, delaying an angry mob's response is not a bad thing. The public can overreact. Even the Founding Fathers knew you could have too much democracy. However, when you're living through a long and self-reinforcing downward spiral, as we are. Unlike Pennsylvania, 26 states have such alternative means of taking action: initiative and referendum.

While the rules differ from state to state, "initiative" is the right of citizens outside the elected leadership to put forth legislation for consideration. "Referendum" is the ability of the citizens to vote on whether a proposal should become law.

"I believe in initiative and referendum, which should be used not to destroy representative government, but to correct it whenever it becomes misrepresentative," said President Theodore Roosevelt over 100 years ago. He believed the only antidote to the political corruption that was even more common in his day was initiative and referendum, hereafter referred to as "direct democracy." President Roosevelt was a man of action.

Yet for Roosevelt, direct democracy was not a replacement but a supplement to representative democracy -- a force that loomed when public officials, for whatever reason, lost their way. Sometimes the threat of an action, rather than the action itself, can get the job done.

Unfortunately, direct democracy is available only in limited instances in Pennsylvania. Voters can approve or reject at the ballot box state bond issues proposed by the Legislature, for instance. In May, three-quarters of the voters in Allegheny County did what the overwhelming majority of elected officials in Allegheny refused to do for over 200 years: reform the row offices. While local home rule charters make initiative and referendum available to citizens, we do not have it at the state level. This must change now. Our commonwealth needs it now more than ever.

The arguments against direct democracy are well known. Although some argue it favors the big-money folks, political scientists who have studied direct democracy in the United States and elsewhere find moneyed special-interest groups almost never succeed in pushing through self-serving initiatives. The other main argument against direct democracy is that minorities suffer. Yet state and federal courts have struck down initiatives that critics claim are abusive of minorities.

Bringing direct democracy to the commonwealth will be very difficult because it will require a change in the Pennsylvania Constitution. Yet we Pennsylvanians should continue to have faith and confidence in the majority of our elected representatives. Let's do the hard work and give ourselves another way to make our collective choices as citizens -- just in case we might need it someday.