Constituent Power and Popular Sovereignty

Abstract Because the people are thought to hold both constituent power and sovereign authority, the two concepts are easily collapsed together. They are, nevertheless, conceptually distinct. Constituent power is an essentially generative or creative power to choose the rules under which one lives. Sovereignty implies ruling over people and things. Thus, constituent power and popular sovereignty refer to different roles the people play vis-à-vis constitutional democracy: constituting and ruling. This chapter focuses on the problems raised when the people both make the constitutional rules but are also supposed to be bound by those rules when ruling. Drawing on contemporary debates in democratic theory, the chapter outlines and analyses four different ways to deal with this dilemma, each of which appeals to a different conception of the people and their political capacity.