Popular sovereignty shows up wherever a political system roots its authority in the consent and active participation of the people rather than in a monarch, military junta, or ruling class. The examples are far more varied than the textbook standbys of the American and French revolutions. From Swiss cantons holding regular ballot votes on legislation, to the more than 130 independence referendums recorded worldwide since 1945, to Indigenous nations drafting their own constitutions, popular sovereignty takes strikingly different forms depending on where and when it operates.
Constitutional Founding Moments
The most familiar examples of popular sovereignty are constitutional founding events, where a people collectively establishes a new government and declares its authority to do so. The United States Constitution, ratified in 1788, opens with “We the People,” a phrase deliberately chosen to signal that the document derived its legitimacy not from the states as political units or from the British Crown, but from the populace itself. The ratification process reinforced the point: the Constitution was submitted to specially elected conventions in each state rather than to existing legislatures, so that ordinary citizens had a more direct hand in approving the new framework.
France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted in 1789, articulated a similar principle in starker terms. It declared that sovereignty resides “essentially in the nation” and that no individual or body could exercise authority that did not emanate from the nation. Both documents became templates. Over the following two centuries, newly independent states across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe drafted constitutions that echoed the same foundational claim: government is legitimate only because the people authorize it.
These founding moments matter because they are not merely symbolic. A constitution that locates sovereignty in the people creates legal expectations. Courts interpret legislation in light of that principle, citizens invoke it to challenge government overreach, and political movements appeal to it when demanding reform. The principle does real institutional work long after the founding generation is gone.
Swiss Direct Democracy
If constitutional conventions represent popular sovereignty at the moment of founding, Switzerland represents something rarer: popular sovereignty as routine governance. Swiss citizens vote on policy questions multiple times per year at the federal, cantonal, and municipal levels. They can force a public vote on any federal law through a “facultative referendum” by gathering 50,000 signatures within 100 days, and they can propose constitutional amendments through a “popular initiative” with 100,000 signatures.
The variation across Swiss cantons is revealing. A study analyzing data across cantons found strikingly clear patterns: cantons that historically used popular assemblies, where citizens gathered physically to vote by show of hands, provided more direct-democratic rights and held popular votes more frequently. Meanwhile, cantons that switched to ballot-box voting achieved higher turnout rates, drawing a larger share of the eligible population into the decision-making process.
1Swiss Political Science Review. Maximising Direct Democracy – by Popular Assemblies or by Ballot Votes?That tradeoff is worth sitting with. The physical assembly model gave citizens broader formal powers, but fewer people actually showed up. The ballot-box model narrowed the menu of decisions slightly but got more people through the door. Both are genuine expressions of popular sovereignty, yet they produce different democratic experiences. Switzerland’s system shows that how you structure participation shapes who participates, and that popular sovereignty is not a single mechanism but a design problem with multiple plausible solutions.
Independence Referendums
One of the most dramatic expressions of popular sovereignty is the independence referendum, in which a population votes on whether to form a new state. These are not rare events. A dataset analyzing independence referendums held worldwide since 1945 identified roughly 130 such votes, spanning every inhabited continent.
2Palgrave Macmillan. The Politics of Independence Referendums: Never Mind the BallotsThe circumstances vary enormously. Decolonization drove many of the mid-twentieth-century examples, as territories in Africa, the Pacific, and the Caribbean voted to confirm their separation from European colonial powers. More recent cases have arisen from secessionist movements within established democracies: Quebec in 1995, Montenegro in 2006, Scotland in 2014, and Catalonia’s contested vote in 2017. In each case, the underlying claim is the same: a distinct people has the right to decide its own political future.
What determines whether a national government actually agrees to let the vote happen? Research on the global dataset suggests two factors matter most: how close the next election is when secessionist demands peak, and whether the central government believes the independence side will actually win. Governments facing imminent elections are more likely to concede a referendum, possibly because refusing one carries electoral costs. Governments that expect the independence side to lose are also more willing to allow a vote, since the result can settle the question on their terms.
3Palgrave Macmillan. The Politics of Independence Referendums: Never Mind the BallotsThe implication is unsettling. A right to self-determination that depends on the strategic calculations of the very government you want to leave is a constrained kind of sovereignty. And when governments refuse to permit a vote, as Spain did with Catalonia, the question of who holds sovereign authority becomes a live and sometimes violent dispute.
Brexit and the Gap Between Advisory Votes and Binding Authority
The 2016 Brexit referendum illustrates a subtler problem: what happens when a popular vote collides with an existing system of parliamentary sovereignty? The United Kingdom has no written constitution that locates sovereignty in the people. Instead, the longstanding legal doctrine is that Parliament is supreme. The European Union Referendum Act 2015 that authorized the Brexit vote was advisory in nature and non-binding on Parliament.
4International Journal of Constitutional Law. Parliamentary sovereignty and the locus of constituent power in the United KingdomIn strict legal terms, then, Parliament could have ignored the result. But that is not what happened. The political legitimacy the referendum conferred on Brexit was so powerful that many members of Parliament who had personally campaigned against leaving the EU nonetheless voted to trigger the withdrawal process. The “will of the people” became an argument that overrode individual representatives’ own judgment, even though the vote carried no legal force.
5International Journal of Constitutional Law. Parliamentary sovereignty and the locus of constituent power in the United KingdomBrexit became a prolonged tug-of-war between popular sovereignty and parliamentary sovereignty. Different factions each claimed to speak for “the people.” Leave supporters argued that Parliament was obligated to deliver the referendum result. Remain supporters argued that Parliament’s sovereignty meant it could and should scrutinize the terms of departure. The government itself fractured, unable for months to pass its negotiated withdrawal agreement. The “will of the people” was invoked by virtually every side of the dispute, often to support contradictory positions.
6International Journal of Constitutional Law. Parliamentary sovereignty and the locus of constituent power in the United KingdomThe Brexit saga is a case study in what happens when popular sovereignty exists as a political force but not as a settled constitutional principle. Without clear rules about when and how a referendum binds the government, the vote created enormous legitimacy but no roadmap for translating that legitimacy into policy. Other countries with advisory referendums, including the Netherlands and several former Soviet states, have experienced milder versions of the same tension.
Indigenous Self-Governance in the United States
Popular sovereignty does not belong exclusively to nation-states. Within the United States, more than 565 Indigenous tribal governments exercise extensive sovereign and political powers. These governments predate the U.S. Constitution and derive their authority from the inherent sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, not from a grant by the federal government.
7Oxford Handbook Topics in Politics. Tribal Constitutions and Native SovereigntyThe form that sovereignty takes varies widely among tribes. Only about 230 of those communities have adopted written tribal constitutions to define and control the political powers of their governments. The rest govern through other means: traditional governance structures, unwritten customary law, council resolutions, or hybrid systems that blend written and oral traditions.
8Oxford Handbook Topics in Politics. Tribal Constitutions and Native SovereigntyThis variation is itself an expression of popular sovereignty. Each community decides for itself how to organize its political life. Some tribes adopted constitutions under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which encouraged (and sometimes pressured) tribes to adopt boilerplate constitutional templates modeled on the U.S. system. Many tribal leaders and scholars have since argued that those template constitutions reflected federal priorities more than Indigenous political traditions, and several tribes have undertaken constitutional reform to better reflect their own values and governance practices.
The broader point is that popular sovereignty does not require a single institutional form. A community that governs itself through clan councils, oral deliberation, and consensus-based decision-making is exercising popular sovereignty no less than one that holds ballot elections. The question is whether the people affected by governance have meaningful authority over how that governance operates, and the answer varies enormously among the 565-plus tribal governments.
Participatory Budgeting and Citizens’ Assemblies
Beyond referendums and constitutions, popular sovereignty has taken newer institutional forms in recent decades. Participatory budgeting, which originated in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989, gives residents direct decision-making power over a portion of a city’s public spending. Neighborhoods hold open meetings, propose projects, and vote on priorities. The model has since spread to thousands of cities worldwide, including New York, Paris, and Seoul. The budgets involved are usually a small fraction of total municipal spending, but the principle is significant: ordinary residents, not just elected officials, allocate public money.
Citizens’ assemblies represent a different innovation. Ireland convened a Citizens’ Assembly in 2016 composed of 99 randomly selected members of the public, tasked with deliberating on contentious constitutional questions including abortion and marriage equality. The assembly’s recommendations fed directly into national referendums, and Irish voters ultimately approved constitutional amendments on both issues. The model gave a randomly selected group of citizens, rather than politicians or lobbyists, the role of framing the questions the broader electorate would decide. Iceland attempted something similar when it crowdsourced a draft constitution after its 2008 financial crisis, though the draft was never formally adopted.
These innovations matter because they address a common criticism of representative democracy: that elections alone do not give citizens enough influence over what happens between election days. Participatory budgeting and citizens’ assemblies create additional channels for popular input, operating alongside rather than replacing elected institutions.
When Popular Sovereignty Gets Claimed by Authoritarian Movements
Not every appeal to “the people” strengthens democracy. One of the more uncomfortable realities of popular sovereignty is that it can be co-opted by movements that ultimately undermine democratic governance. Populist leaders in several countries have invoked the “will of the people” to justify eroding judicial independence, weakening press freedom, and concentrating executive power.
Research analyzing populism’s relationship to democratic institutions argues that the populist plea for empowering “the people” tends to promote practices that stand in direct opposition to the foundational doctrines of liberal, rule-based democracy. In cases where populist parties have captured positions of power, their promises to embolden disillusioned citizens have regularly morphed into government practices that violate traditional standards of democratic accountability.
9PubMed Central. The ‘Will of the People’: The Populist Challenge to Democracy in the Name of Popular SovereigntyHungary under Viktor Orbán offers a concrete illustration. Orbán’s Fidesz party won supermajorities in Parliament and used them to rewrite the constitution, pack the courts, and reshape electoral rules, all while claiming a democratic mandate from the Hungarian people. Poland’s Law and Justice party pursued similar strategies before losing power in 2023. In both cases, the language of popular sovereignty, government by and for the people, was deployed to justify the centralization of power in ways that made future democratic competition harder.
The analytical point is that popular sovereignty as a political concept is distinct from popular sovereignty as an institutional practice. When a leader claims to embody the will of the people and uses that claim to dismantle checks and balances, the claim itself has not changed, but the institutional reality has. The principle that government should serve the people can paradoxically be weaponized against the very mechanisms, independent courts, free press, minority protections, that make government accountable to the people in practice.
10PubMed Central. The ‘Will of the People’: The Populist Challenge to Democracy in the Name of Popular SovereigntySovereignty Conflicts in Supranational Systems
The European Union presents yet another dimension of the popular sovereignty question. EU member states have voluntarily pooled portions of their sovereignty in areas like trade, competition law, and monetary policy (for eurozone members). This arrangement has introduced considerable institutional indeterminacy into the political systems of member states, creating many of the sovereignty conflicts visible in European politics today.
11PubMed Central. Conflicts of sovereignty in contemporary Europe: a framework of analysisThe tension is straightforward in principle but messy in practice. If the French people are sovereign, can their elected government be overridden by EU regulations they did not directly vote on? If the Polish people are sovereign, can the EU enforce rule-of-law standards against a democratically elected Polish government? These are not hypothetical questions. They drive real political crises. The German Constitutional Court has repeatedly asserted that EU law has limits rooted in the German people’s sovereignty as expressed through their Basic Law. Hungarian and Polish governments have used similar logic to resist EU oversight of their judicial and media reforms.
Brexit was, in part, a response to this same tension. The Leave campaign’s most effective slogan, “Take Back Control,” was fundamentally an argument about popular sovereignty: the British people should be the ultimate authority over laws that govern Britain. Whether EU membership actually prevented that is debatable, but the framing resonated precisely because it tapped into a deep intuition about where political authority should reside.
Supranational institutions create genuine benefits, harmonized standards, larger markets, coordinated responses to cross-border problems, but they also create a legitimacy gap. The people of individual member states feel sovereign. The EU as a whole has no single “demos,” no unified people, that could exercise popular sovereignty in the traditional sense. That structural mismatch is unlikely to disappear, and it ensures that sovereignty conflicts will remain a recurring feature of European politics for the foreseeable future.
12PubMed Central. Conflicts of sovereignty in contemporary Europe: a framework of analysisThe Antebellum United States and Territorial Expansion
One historical example that readers sometimes overlook, but that carried enormous consequences, is the use of popular sovereignty as a policy for settling the question of slavery in new American territories. In the 1850s, Senator Stephen Douglas championed the idea that settlers in each new territory should vote for themselves on whether to permit slavery, rather than having Congress decide. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 put this principle into practice, overriding the earlier Missouri Compromise that had drawn a geographic line between free and slave territory.
The result was catastrophic. Pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers flooded into Kansas to influence the vote, leading to years of guerrilla violence known as “Bleeding Kansas.” Ballot fraud was rampant, with armed groups from neighboring Missouri crossing the border to stuff ballot boxes. Two rival territorial governments, one pro-slavery and one free-state, operated simultaneously, each claiming to represent the true will of the people.
The Kansas experience is a cautionary tale about popular sovereignty in the absence of shared norms and enforceable rules. The principle that the people should decide sounds unimpeachable in the abstract, but when the stakes are high enough and the institutional framework is weak enough, the question of who counts as “the people” and how their will gets measured can become a source of conflict rather than a resolution of it. The failure of popular sovereignty in Kansas accelerated the political breakdown that led to the Civil War, making it one of the most consequential and least successful applications of the principle in American history.