Workshop Paper 2025 ● Open Access

Multi-level Architecture for
Separation of Powers
in Legislative Process

Authors Palmirani · Papalia · Bomprezzi · Zichichi · Arruzzoli · Ferretti
Published 14 June 2025
Venue Distributed Ledger Technology Workshop 2025 · CEUR-WS Vol. 4105
Language English
Download PDF View on CEUR-WS ↗ Cite this paper
Monica Palmirani Ludovico Papalia Chantal Bomprezzi Mirko Zichichi Arianna Arruzzoli Stefano Ferretti

Contemporary democracies are based on three founding principles: i) separation of powers, which balances against excessive centralisation through checks and balances; ii) institutional representation of the people, ensuring an active role for minorities and opposition; iii) citizen participation and transparency in legislative, judicial and administrative processes. Within this framework, this work proposes a multilevel DLT architecture to ensure: a) separation of powers between institutions involved in the legislative process, providing autonomy to various actors (e.g., Chamber, Senate, Government, Ministers); b) active stakeholder participation (e.g., associations, municipalities, regions); c) transparent and public decision-making. A blockchain architecture with three interconnected yet autonomous levels is designed to respect the constitutional separation of powers. This system implements these three principles whilst leveraging blockchain characteristics to ensure traceability, authority, integrity, and selective transparency for publishable information only. The project involves the implementation of three levels of DLT (Private Institutional Blockchain, Inter-Institutional Coordination Blockchain, Public Legislative Blockchain) and the use of the MOVE language to model smart contracts that regulate legislative procedures between institutions. Akoma Ntoso XML OASIS standard will also be used to model legislative documents and track changes introduced by different institutions. Finally, Decentralized Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) implemented through the IOTA Identity framework will be used for permissioned access in the private blockchain.

Separation of Powers Blockchain Distributed Ledger Technology Legislative Process Akoma Ntoso Smart Contracts MOVE Language Self-Sovereign Identity IOTA Identity Digital Government Parliamentary Informatics Constitutional Law Legal Informatics
Palmirani, M., Papalia, L., Bomprezzi, C., Zichichi, M., Arruzzoli, A., & Ferretti, S. (2025). Multi-level architecture for separation of powers in legislative process. In Proceedings of the Distributed Ledger Technology Workshop 2025. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 4105. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-4105/paper12.pdf