Which Representation?

In order to realise this federation, ‘the central problem’, in Olivetti’s view, ‘consists in extending the same political equilibrium which exists in the Community to each of the higher bodies, whose exercise of the three powers—legislative, executive and juridical—is transferred to the Federal State itself’. He outlines, therefore, ‘a type of pyramidal State in which a rigid organisation of micro-government of the Communities takes shape, from which Power is born’. The federated Communities give rise to the Regions which, in turn, constitute the State, through ‘a precise hierarchical order, where voting based on the integration of the territorial principle (amongst the Regions) and of the functional principle (amongst homogeneous groups, including the Nation as a whole), guarantees an efficient democratic order: this is the reason for which ‘the Federal State outlined here takes its name from the Communities and not from the Regions: in fact it is the executives of the Communities which participate, in direct and indirect manner, in the formulation of federal bodies’.