Popular sovereignty holds that the ultimate source of political authority is the people, not a monarch, aristocracy, or external power. Citizens are the sovereigns; government officials are their agents or representatives. This principle justifies democratic governance and constrains representation: a representative government is legitimate only when it genuinely reflects the people's will, not sectional interests or elite preferences.
From your study of democracy and self-governance, you understand the descriptive claim that democratic systems distribute political decision-making across citizens through voting, deliberation, and representation. Popular sovereignty is the normative and philosophical underpinning of that arrangement — the claim that the people are not just the mechanism through which democratic decisions happen, but the ultimate source from which all legitimate political authority flows.
The distinction matters. A constitutional monarchy might make decisions democratically through an elected parliament, yet still trace ultimate authority to the crown. Popular sovereignty holds that this gets the order of authority exactly backwards. Governments, legislatures, and courts derive their authority from the people; the people do not hold their political status as a grant from governmental power. This is what American revolutionary rhetoric captured in phrases like "government of the people, by the people, for the people" — not merely that government serves popular interests, but that popular will is the ultimate legitimating force.
Rousseau's conception of the general will (your soft prerequisite) is the most philosophically developed version of this idea. For Rousseau, the general will is distinct from the will of all (the mere aggregate of individual preferences) — it is what the people would will if they deliberated as citizens seeking the common good rather than as private individuals seeking personal advantage. Popular sovereignty, for Rousseau, requires that the general will be realized in law: law is legitimate when it expresses what the people collectively will for themselves as a community, not what any faction or elite imposes on them. This has the striking implication that even a democratically expressed majority vote might fail to reflect genuine popular sovereignty if the voters were acting from private interest rather than civic concern.
The agent-principal relationship is a useful frame for understanding how popular sovereignty operates in practice. Citizens are the principal (the ultimate authority); government officials are agents who are delegated powers to act on the principal's behalf. Legitimate government is accountable government: agents must answer to principals, their powers are delegated rather than original, and the delegation can be revoked or redirected through elections, constitutions, and legal accountability. The deep tension in popular sovereignty is between its procedural and substantive dimensions: procedurally, popular sovereignty might seem to simply mean "whatever the majority decides is authoritative." But this runs into the problem that majorities can oppress minorities, can vote to strip rights from future generations, or can decide, by vote, to dissolve democracy itself. Substantive accounts hold that popular sovereignty must be exercised within constraints — human rights, constitutional limits — that protect the very conditions under which popular sovereignty remains meaningful.
Topics in reflective domains aren't scored by quiz answers. Read, reflect, and mark when you've thought it through.