Popular Sovereignty and Citizenship: What They Mean

Article 1 of the Italian Constitution holds two short statements together. The first defines the form of the state: “Italy is a democratic Republic founded on labor.” The second says where its power comes from: “Sovereignty belongs to the people, who exercise it within the forms and limits of the Constitution.” These are two different claims: one describes what kind of state Italy is, the other explains who ultimately holds its authority.

The delicate part sits in the second half of that sentence. The text does not say the people govern without intermediaries; it says they do so “within the forms and limits of the Constitution.” The forms are the elected Parliament, periodic elections, and the referendums the text itself provides; the limits are the rules those same forms must respect, starting with the rights the Constitution recognizes. For anyone studying the full structure of the Italian Constitution, this is the point that matters: the people’s power passes through the institutions the Constitution itself entrusts with it.

Practical example: when a citizen votes in a political election, they are exercising popular sovereignty through one of the “forms” the Constitution provides, not governing directly; the actual decision on a law still passes through the Parliament that vote elected.

The forms and limits Article 1 refers to are themselves written into legal rules, not simple customs: the difference between a rule that binds the state and a habit that does not is exactly what a legal norm is about.

What citizenship means

Citizenship is a distinct concept from popular sovereignty, even though Article 1 touches on both in the same sentence when it mentions “the people.” Sovereignty concerns the state as a whole, while citizenship concerns the individual person. The Enciclopedia Treccani defines citizenship as the condition of an individual’s belonging to a state, together with the rights and duties that relationship carries.

In Italy, how a person becomes a citizen is regulated by Law No. 91 of February 5, 1992, published in the Official Gazette on February 15, 1992 and in force since August 16, 1992. Article 1 of that law establishes that a child of a citizen father or mother is a citizen by birth, the criterion known as jus sanguinis. A second criterion, jus soli, applies in Italy only as a residual case: someone born on the territory of the Republic becomes a citizen by birth if both parents are unknown or stateless. There is also a third route, naturalization, which Treccani describes as acquiring citizenship at the applicant’s own request, once that person meets the conditions the law sets.

Practical example: a child born in Italy to two Italian parents is a citizen by jus sanguinis from birth, regardless of where the birth took place; had the child been born abroad, they would still be an Italian citizen under the same criterion.

On losing citizenship, Treccani notes that forfeiting Italian citizenship is limited to two specific cases, tied to taking on public office or serving in the military for a foreign state, and that Italian citizenship can also be lost through explicit renunciation. These are defined cases, not a status that fades simply through the passage of time or a move abroad.

Where the idea of popular sovereignty comes from

The idea that state power belongs to the people themselves, rather than to a sovereign set apart from them, has a longer history than Italy’s twentieth-century Constitution. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the earlier models of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes placed sovereignty in a sovereign standing above the population. Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed an alternative: in the Social Contract, a work from 1762, he described “the collective people within a state as the sovereign, ruling through their general will,” meaning the people themselves, as a whole, as the sovereign governing through their own general will.

That shift is the conceptual root of what Article 1 of the Italian Constitution states. The same Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that, in contemporary constitutional government, it is the people ruling through a body of law that is sovereign, “the version that commands legitimacy most commonly in the world today.” It is the same pattern found in Italy’s Article 1: not a people acting without constraints, but a people governing inside a body of law that they themselves, through their institutions, have helped shape.

No state, for that matter, exercises its sovereignty in complete isolation. By joining treaties and international organizations, states accept agreed limits on their own power, as happens in the everyday workings of the European Union. “Sovereignty” is, after all, a word used in other fields too, not only the constitutional one: food sovereignty, for instance, refers to a territory’s ability to decide over its own food, a different use of the same word applied to another domain.

Citizenship and popular sovereignty, two sides of the same question

Citizenship and popular sovereignty answer two different but connected questions. The first asks who belongs to the state, and with what rights and duties; the second asks where that same state’s power comes from. Article 1 of the Constitution holds them together in a single sentence, while Law No. 91 of 1992 works out the details only of the first question, establishing precisely who is an Italian citizen and how one becomes one.

Understanding the difference also helps in reading the rest of the Constitution more carefully: whenever the text mentions “the people,” it is referring, depending on context, either to the body of citizens holding sovereignty or to the sum of individual persons who have been granted that status.