Abstract
Once the people become sovereign – as they ostensibly have in today’s self-described democracies – public opinion must play some role in determining the legitimacy of sovereign power.¹ In standard treatments of democratic politics, public opinion – the will of the people – is widely assumed to be the origin of public policy. While empirical studies may call into question the extent to which public policy does in fact reflect public opinion (Gilens and Page 2014; Enns 2015; Bashir 2015), there is no debate among normative theorists of democracy that public policy ought to reflect public opinion.