He says that the people exercise sovereignty directly through electoral power, and indirectly through influence, intimidation or potential threat of revolution or rebellion. The ultimate repository of political power is the mass of the people. They are ultimately the masters. Hence every kind of rule exists by virtue of their tacit consent.
Thus Ritchie bases the sovereignty of the people on their tacit consent and not on contract, as Rousseau did more than a century and half before him. The merit of Ritchie’s theory lies in the fact that he did not assert that the people ought to be sovereign in the last resort, as others say, but that they are sovereign all the time. Yet he fails to explain the nature of consent and the organisation of the people’s sovereignty, as we shall see presently. Criticism.
The theory of popular sovereignty has been subjected to criticism on many grounds. They are as follows:
Vagueness of the Theory
The theory of popular sovereignty is vague, and even confusing, because the popular sovereignty is itself of a very loose and inexact form. It has the same vagueness about it as the ancient saying, vox populi, vox Dei – the voice of the people is the voice of God. It does not explain the question, “who are the people?
The indeterminate character of the ‘people
When asked “who are the people, the advocates of the popular sovereignty are unable to answer in clear-cut terms. If we mean by people the entire unorganised mass of people living in a State, then, we necessarily include in it the children, the idiots, the insolvents and all sorts of criminals and law-breakers, who cannot obviously be included among the sovereign people. In those countries where the women are not given the right to vote, they also cannot be included among the “sovereign people”. That will create a new difficulty, because nearly one-half of the people are not included in the sovereign. So the more we try to analyze the meanings of the “sovereign” people, the less we know about it.
The inherent impossibility of organizing the sovereignty’ of the people
It is easy to say that the people are sovereign, but it is difficult to tell how. Organization is the virtue of sovereignty. Sovereignty is the power to command obedience; but it must be an organised power before it is obeyed. When a people become organised they are necessarily led by some leaders and parties. But then they are no longer sovereign, for he who organises the people becomes the sovereign, which means the legal sovereign. Here we find a contradiction in terms.
If popular sovereignty means the power of the unorganised mass of the people, there is no State and therefore no sovereignty. But if they become organised, they become legal sovereign. It is said that it can be expressed by public opinion. But unorganised public opinion, however powerful, is not an expression of sovereignty. When it becomes organised, it does not remain the opinion of all the people; because it is necessarily the opinion of the majority of the people. Understood in any of these senses, popular sovereignty is an illogical and contradictory concept: either it is not sovereign, or it is not popular.
It is also suggested that the sovereignty of the people is expressed by the electorate, i.e., by the right to vote. But the right to vote is a legal right which is given not to all persons but to those who are qualified to exercise it. Actually it is often found that only 30% of the entire population of a country really exercise the right to vote. As elections are decided by majority votes, the majority of the electorate will constitute barely 15% of the whole people, which is, indeed, a very small minority of the people Hence the sovereignty of the people, as expressed by the electorate will be a sovereignty of a small and indeterminate minority of the whole population. So, adult suffrage is not a good criterion of popular sovereignty.
Moreover, it is said by Ritchie that the people are sovereign because they are always more numerous than any government which might oppose them. Therefore, their physical superiority and force will always decide every political issue and limit the actions of the government. But millions of unorganised men without discipline, weapons and modem equipment, can be easily overawed by a few thousands of well-organised soldiers. Sovereignty, is this case, does not lie with the people but with a handful of men who have organised the army and the police.
We conclude, therefore, that either popular sovereignty is no sovereignty at all, or it is another name for political sovereignty. If the people are not organised, they are not sovereign; but if they are organised, they become political sovereign, who act through the legal and constitutional channels of elections and franchise. In any case, the notion of popular sovereignty is the vanishing point of sovereignty. “The will of the people”, says Maclver, “is rarely, if ever, the will of all the people”.
Importance and merits of the theory
It cannot be denied that the concept of popular sovereignty “contains great truth and is the basis of democratic faith. It emphasizes that the people are the sovereign power though they don’t exercise it”. It stresses the importance of public opinion in modem democracy. It is a useful concept, provided we keep in mind the distinction between the legal power and moral influence because, in the last analysis, popular sovereignty signifies the moral control and influence over the legislature or the legal sovereign. As Gamer says, it is nothing more than the power of the majority of the electorate in a country where a system of universal suffrage prevails, acting through legally established channels, to express their will and to make it prevail.
As Laski puts it, “All, in fact, that the theory of the popular sovereignty seems to mean is that the interests which prevail must be the interests of the mass of men rather than of any special portion of community” Lastly, this theory rightly emphasizes the role of force of numbers in the State. Indeed force is an element of sovereignty, but the test of Statesmanship lies in the fact how and when this force is to be exercised: “the highest ideal of Statesmanship is to render the actual exercise of such force as seldom necessary as possible, and the extent to which this aim is attained will depend largely upon the degree in which the State action corresponds with the desire of Public Opinion or the General Will”.
The theory of popular sovereignty is both a guide to Statesmanship and a chart of the political health of a State. Lastly, the theory of popular sovereignty emphasizes a basic truth that government should be both constitutional and popular, that is, it must be so organised that public opinion is able to express itself in a legal way as readily as possible and that this opinion is expressed by as large a part of the people as possible. This is done by such means as a written constitution, fundamental rights, universal suffrage, representative legislature, frequent elections, local self-government and responsibility of the government to the people, and the direct legislation by the people in regard to certain important legislation by means of referendum and initiative. So, as Gilchrist says, the idea of popular sovereignty can be better expressed by the term “popular control” of the government. But it is more of a moral influence than a legal power.