<em><u>The concept that the authority of the state and government are created by the consent of its people through elected representatives is called popular sovereignty</u></em>. It means rule by the people. It was propounded by social contract school philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau. This doctrine was used in United States by allowing the people to decide type of their government and the laws they wanted to have. It was used in deciding the issue of slavery and determining whether the newly incorporated territories of the west would accept of reject the slavery.
