What Is the Relationship Between Government and People?

All political communities, wherever they are shape, size doesn't matter. You can divide them up between the people that we would recognize as having a particular kind of power and those who have to bear consequences for their decisions. In pre modern conceptions of politics, what is the relationship between these two sets of people, rulers and ruled? Government and people? The structure of politics is specifically designed to get away from seeing that as a choice. There are lots of different terms we could use to describe these people, the many and the few or the mass and the elite. We might call them the people and the government.