Popular Sovereignty

The Declaration of Independence asserted that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and the Constitution opens with We the People, not We the States. The framers had the Constitution ratified by special conventions elected for the purpose, rather than by state legislatures, to ground it directly in popular consent. The people act through elections and through the amendment process of Article V, though the United States, unlike many democracies, has no national referendum.

The founders' electorate was narrow, mostly white men who owned property. Amendments have widened it repeatedly: the Fifteenth barred racial discrimination in voting in 1870, the Seventeenth gave voters the choice of senators in 1913, the Nineteenth barred sex discrimination in 1920, the Twenty-fourth abolished poll taxes in federal elections in 1964, and the Twenty-sixth lowered the voting age to eighteen in 1971. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 made the Fifteenth Amendment's promise enforceable. About half the states let citizens propose laws or constitutional amendments directly by initiative.

The framers also limited direct popular rule, through the Electoral College, the originally indirect election of senators, life-tenured judges, and a Bill of Rights that majorities cannot override by ordinary vote. The resulting system is a republic built on popular consent but filtered through representation. In the 1850s the phrase took on a different meaning when Stephen Douglas used it for letting territorial settlers decide whether to allow slavery, a policy that helped bring on the Civil War.