Grand Council (Aargau)

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Grand Council building

The Grand Council of the Canton of Aargau is the Parliament of the Canton of Aargau . It meets in the Grand Council building in Aarau and is the canton's legislative and supreme supervisory authority. Its 140 members are elected for four years according to the proportional procedure , whereby the bi- proportional allocation procedure according to Pukelsheim ( double Pukelsheim ) is used. The year of office begins in January; the meetings are always held on a Tuesday. The last general renewal election took place on October 18, 2020 together with the government council election, see Grand Council election in Aargau. The term of office of the current Grand Council runs from January 1, 2017 to December 31, 2020.

story

Since the founding of the canton in 1803 by Napoleon Bonaparte , the Grand Council, a parliament with 150 members, has met in the city ​​hall . In 1811, the cantonal government decided to add two wings to the existing Löwen Inn, with the cantonal parliament taking over the west wing. The political changes delayed the construction of the Grand Council building for several years, and conservative forces had pushed through a revision of the cantonal constitution in 1814 under the influence of the restoration . The popular election of the Grand Council was severely restricted. Only 48 of 150 councilors could be directly elected by the people. In 1823, the parliamentarians called on the government to take action on the conference building. The following year, she decided to build a separate parliament building on the hill behind the government building. The Grand Council building was finally built between 1826 and 1828. The new constitution, which came into force in 1831, stipulated that almost all councilors had to be elected directly, and the council was allowed to discuss and amend laws. The decision of the Grand Council of 1841 to abolish all monasteries in the canton of Aargau led to the Aargau monastery dispute . This conflict almost resulted in a war with Austria and finally culminated in the Sonderbund War of 1847. The cantonal constitution was completely revised in 1885, and the first parties came into being in the 1890s. The number of members of the Grand Council was set at 200 in 1952. Full women's suffrage was only introduced in 1971. A new constitution came into force in 1980, and the Grand Council was given planning powers. The Grand Council has had 140 members since 2005.

tasks

The Aargau Cantonal Constitution regulates the powers of the Grand Council in Articles 76 ff. It is therefore the legislative and supreme supervisory authority in the canton, consists of 140 members and is elected for four years. The Grand Council elects the president and two deputies from among its members for one year; These represent the Presidium of the Grand Council. In addition, the Grand Council elects the members and presidents of the cantonal courts for a period of four years. The body is considered to be able to negotiate if at least 71 members are present (Art. 27 Business Transaction Act GVG).

The Grand Council decides on laws and / or changes or repeals them, which requires two consultations (Art. 78). For laws whose entry into force cannot be postponed, the immediate entry into force can be decided if an absolute majority of all members of the Grand Council is in favor. Basically, resolutions are subject to a referendum if they contain constitutional amendments. Resolutions that were not passed by an absolute majority of all members of the Grand Council also come before the people. Even if there is an absolute majority, a quarter of the members of parliament can call for a referendum (mandatory referendum, Art. 62 cantonal constitution). On the other hand, an optional vote can be brought about by referendum if at least 3,000 people entitled to vote so request (Art. 63 cantonal constitution). This request must be submitted within 90 days of the publication of the resolution (Art. 41 Law on Political Rights).

In decisions about new financial obligations of the canton, the canton council is entitled to freely decide on one-off expenses of up to 5 million francs or recurring expenses of up to 500,000 francs. Above these limits, there is the possibility of subjecting decisions made by the Cantonal Council to a referendum by means of an optional referendum. There is also the possibility of a popular initiative. 3,000 people entitled to vote can request the Grand Council to bring about a change in the constitution or the law. (Art. 64 Cantonal Constitution) A period of twelve months applies here after publication by the initiators (Art. 54 Law on Political Rights).

Parties

In the elections from 1997 to 2020, the participating parties achieved the following number of seats and voting shares. It should be noted that the number of MPs has been reduced from 200 to 140 from 2005.

14th
23
13
6th
18th
21st
43
2
14th 23 13 6th 18th 21st 43 2 
A total of 140 seats
  Distribution of seats 2020 2016 2012 2009 2005 2001 1997
  SVP 43 seats 45 seats 45 seats 45 seats 46 seats 72 seats 47 seats
  FDP / LP 21 seats 22 seats 22 seats 20 seats 24 seats 40 seats 40 seats
  SP 23 seats 27 seats 22 seats 22 seats 30 seats 36 seats 48 seats
  CVP 18 seats 17 seats 19 seats 21 seats 26 seats 32 seats 37 seats
  Green 14 seats 10 seats 10 seats 13 seats 7 seats 7 seats 6 seats
  GLP 13 seats 7 seats 8 seats 5 seats --- --- ---
  EPP 6 seats 6 seats 6 seats 6 seats 7 seats 8 seats 8 seats
  BDP --- 4 seats 6 seats 4 seats --- --- ---
  EDU 2 seats 2 seats 2 seats 2 seats --- --- 1 seat
  SD --- --- --- 2 seats --- 4 seats 7 seats
  FP --- --- --- --- --- 1 seat 4 seats
  LdU --- --- --- --- --- --- 2 seats
  total 140 seats 140 seats 140 seats 140 seats 140 seats 200 seats 200 seats
Aargau Grand Council elections on October 18, 2020
Turnout: 33.03%
 %
40
30th
20th
10
0
30.31
16.55
14.71
12.80
10.01
9.23
4.20
1.60
0.60
Otherwise.
Gains and losses
compared to 2016
 % p
   4th
   2
   0
  -2
  -4
−1.63
−2.37
−1.29
+0.70
+2.96
+3.97
+0.15
−0.17
−2.32
Otherwise.
  Voting shares 2020 2016 2012 2009 2005 2001 1997
  SVP 30.3% 31.9% 32.0% 31.9% 30.3% 33.5% 21.9%
  SP 16.6% 18.9% 15.2% 15.7% 19.7% 18.6% 21.7%
  FDP / LP 14.7% 16.0% 15.4% 14.3% 16.9% 19.0% 19.6%
  CVP 12.8% 12.1% 13.3% 15.0% 17.5% 15.0% 17.3%
  Green 10.1% 7.1% 7.4% 8.9% 6.8% 4.0% 3.5%
  GLP 9.2% 5.3% 5.5% 3.5% --- --- ---
  EPP 4.2% 4.1% 3.9% 4.5% 5.7% 4.9% 4.3%
  EDU 1.6% 1.8% 1.7% 1.8% 0.7% 1.0% 1.3%
  BDP --- 2.7% 4.4% 3.1% --- --- ---
  SD --- --- 0.7% 1.2% 1.3% 1.8% 3.2%
  LdU --- --- --- --- --- 1.4% ---

Members

eligibility

In principle, every person entitled to vote is eligible. Every Swiss citizen residing in Aargau who has not been incapacitated and who has reached the age of 18 is entitled to vote (Art. 59 of the cantonal constitution). The constitution and laws explicitly state that the right to vote is not just a right, but an obligation. However, anyone who does not exercise their voting rights will not be punished for this.

Article 1 of the Incompatibility Act of the Canton of Aargau stipulates that relatives and persons in law up to the second degree, spouses, registered partners, and the spouses and registered partners of siblings may not be members of the same authority. However, in Article 2, the Grand Council is exempt from this regulation.

In particular, however, the Grand Council must not include any members who are employed by the canton under public law; The district officials and their deputies are also excluded from being elected to the Grand Council, as are the members of all higher courts in the canton.

In contrast to other cantons, there is no term limit for the Grand Council of the Canton of Aargau. Herbert H. Scholl is currently the oldest member of the Grand Council at over 31 years of age.

Number and distribution among the constituencies

The number of members is 140 (Art. 76 Cantonal Constitution). These are elected in eleven constituencies according to a proportional representation procedure. The constituencies correspond to the districts, as defined in Article 103 of the cantonal constitution. The distribution of the MPs to the constituencies results from their population as of December 31 of the second election year preceding the election year (Article 4a Ordinance on the Grand Council Election Act). On November 1, 2019, the government council announced that one seat would go from the Brugg district (new 10 seats) to the Lenzburg district (new 13 seats) for the 2021/2024 term of office.

The following mandates are currently distributed among the districts (as of June 30, 2019):

district population Number of representatives
Aarau 78,511 16
to bathe 144'705 30th
Bremgarten 77,687 16
Brugg 51,080 10
Kulm 41,749 9
Laufenburg 32,595 7th
Lenzburg 63,731 13
Muri 36,490 7th
Rheinfelden 47,799 10
Zofingen 72,198 15th
Zurzach 34,526 7th

compensation

The “Law on the organization of the Grand Council and on the intercourse between the Grand Council, the Government Council and the Supreme Court” or “Business Transaction Act, GVG” for short regulates the general remuneration of parliamentarians in Articles 58a and 58b. The remuneration is then specified in detail in the “Decree on the Management of the Grand Council”, or “Rules of Procedure” for short.

The members of the Grand Council receive an attendance fee of 150 francs for attending the meetings of the council, the office and the commissions. If one or more meetings on the same day together last more than three hours, two attendance fees will be paid, and if more than six hours, three attendance fees will be paid.

In addition, a travel fee of 70 cents per kilometer of road is paid. In addition, there is a meal allowance of CHF 30 per day of the meeting. 120 francs per day for meals and accommodation expenses will be reimbursed for meetings that last two or more days in a row and that it is not possible to return to the place of residence or that the meeting is more difficult. Entitlement to attendance and expense allowances depends on attendance; this must be proven by entry in an attendance list no later than one hour after the start of the meeting. The President of the Cantonal Council receives annual flat-rate compensation of CHF 20,000, and the Vice-Presidents each receive CHF 5,000.

Members of the Grand Council

  • 2021-2024
  • 2017-2020

Past legislatures

  • 2013-2016

Election process and allocation of seats

In the general renewal elections in 2008, the biproportional seat allocation procedure according to Pukelsheim was used for the first time in the canton of Aargau . Before that, the Hagenbach-Bischoff procedure (which is still common in many places in Switzerland today) was common, but it systematically favored the stronger parties. In order to partially compensate for this disadvantage, the smaller parties were free to enter into list connections.

Since the application of the "double Pukelsheim" list connections are no longer permitted (Art. 8 Grand Council Election Act).

In the election, every citizen has as many votes as there are mandates to be given in the constituency (Art. 1 Grand Council Election Act).

There is the possibility of accumulation, but a candidate can be given a maximum of two votes. Candidates can also be deleted from one list and replaced by other candidates from another list (variegation). There is also the possibility of creating a free list (Art. 10 Grand Council Election Act).

Each party is free to choose in which of the eleven electoral districts they want to run with nominations (lists). At the cantonal level, all these lists of a party - "lists with the same name" - are referred to as a list group (Art. 13, Paragraph 1 of the Grand Council Election Act).

quorum

With the amendment to the law of June 2011, which was approved by referendum on November 27, 2011, a quorum was included in the Grand Council election law - analogous to the threshold clauses known in Germany. In order to be taken into account in the allocation of seats, the list groups must meet one of the following two conditions. Either at least 5% of the party votes cast must be achieved in one district; or for the entire canton, a share of the number of voters of at least 3% must be achieved (Art. 13, Paragraph 2).

The number of voters is a kind of equivalent value for how many voters supported a party. In the Baden district with 30 representatives, voters have 30 votes, in the Laufenburg district with 7 representatives, only 7 votes. The number of voters is thus obtained in the individual districts by dividing the number of party votes by the number of representatives.

The introduction of the quorum in the 2012 elections was fatal for the SD (Swiss Democrats), they lost their previous two seats. Without a quorum, the SD would have been guaranteed a mandate with a voting number of 847, which they would have received in the Kulm district. The FDP would have received one less mandate there. Instead, the FDP would have received a second mandate in Lenzburg at the expense of the EPP, which would only have 5 instead of 6 seats across the canton. The Social-Liberal Movement (SLB), which with a voter count of 605 would have been entitled to a mandate and would have received it in the Aarau district, also failed due to the quorum. This would have been at the expense of the SVP. The SVP, however, would have received a 9th mandate in the Baden district, at the expense of the SP, which would have had only 4 mandates there and 21 instead of 22 across the canton.

Seat allocation process

The allocation process consists of two steps: the upper allocation and the sub-allocation.

Allotment

The upper allocation represents the simpler step, because here it is only determined which overall cantonal seat entitlement all list groups to be considered have.

For this purpose, the party votes received are divided by the number of mandates to be awarded at the district level. You get the respective number of voters - as already mentioned above. The voter numbers of the individual (district) lists are added up per list group. In order to determine the seat entitlements from this number of voters, a suitable divisor must be found that divides the individual numbers of voters so that the sum of the commercially rounded quotients is 140 - the number of seats in the Grand Council (Art. 14 Grand Council Election Act).

This divisor is referred to by law as the canton key.

The following table shows the overall allocation for the 2016 election results:

List group Voter count Share of voters in% Divisor (canton key) Seat entitlement
SVP 41,837 31.94 934 45
SP 24,783 18.92 934 27
FDP 20,956 15.36 934 22nd
CVP 15,856 12.10 934 17th
Green 9237 7.05 934 10
GLP 6890 5.26 934 7th
EPP 5303 4.05 934 6th
BDP 3544 2.71 934 4th
EDU 2319 1.77 934 2 (*)
SLB 225 0.17 934 Missing quorum
LOVB 47 0.04 934 Missing quorum

(*) 3% quorum missing, but 5.4% of the party votes in the Kulm district received

Sub-allocation

Finally, in the sub-allocation, the allocation of the seat entitlements to the lists in the individual districts should be determined.

This is the most complicated part of the allocation of seats, because the mandates must be assigned in such a way that each party gets the number of its seats as closely as possible to its voting results, but at the same time exactly as many seats are allocated in each district as this mandate is entitled to.

To do this, a suitable constituency divisor has to be found for each constituency - i.e. eleven different numbers - and in turn a suitable list group divisor has to be found for each list group; in the case of the 2012 election results, these were nine numbers. The electoral numbers of each district are now divided by the respective list group divisor and the constituency divisor and the result is rounded commercially (Art. 14a Grand Council Election Act).

The search for the right divisors is an iterative process, so you have to search for the optimal result by specifically adapting the divisors. In contrast to the Hagenbach-Bischoff method, which leads to a result with a fixed number of calculation steps, the Pukelsheim method has to be "tried out" until the correct result is achieved. Depending on the starting values ​​with which you start, this procedure may require a larger number of calculation steps (iteration steps).

As with the Hagenbach-Bischoff method, different divisors can be found for the correct result.

The following table shows the sub-allocation of the 2012 election results.

The party votes and the allocated seats are shown in brackets in the cells. The number of seats results from dividing the party votes by the constituency divisor and the list group divisor with subsequent commercial rounding.

List group Aarau to bathe Bremgarten Brugg Kulm Laufenburg Lenzburg Muri Rheinfelden Zofingen Zurzach List group divisor
SVP 75,458 (5) 206,770 (8) 71,981 (6) 37,733 (3) 24,937 (3) 16,238 (2) 47,207 (4) 15,138 (3) 21,103 (3) 56,932 (5) 18,965 (3) 1.01
SP 47,612 (3) 116,613 (5) 31,864 (2) 19,225 (2) 7179 (1) 6763 (1) 19,984 (2) 4544 (1) 12,191 (2) 29,110 (2) 5909 (1) 1
CVP 17,195 (1) 130,890 (5) 36,685 (3) 10,331 (1) 1128 (0) 10,545 (2) 8695 (1) 12,693 (2) 10,434 (1) 10,864 (1) 11,863 (2) 1
FDP 47,744 (3) 118,415 (5) 32,234 (2) 19,450 (2) 11,831 (2) 5158 (1) 20,359 (1) 4388 (1) 12,141 (2) 26,783 (2) 5589 (1) 1.06
Green 23,149 (1) 49,921 (2) 12,195 (1) 9629 (1) 6552 (1) 4116 (1) 8348 (1) 3234 (0) 6950 (1) 12,895 (1) 1988 (0) 1.1
EPP 14,665 (1) 28,299 (1) 3047 (0) 6513 (1) 4339 (1) 590 (0) 7188 (1) 0 (0) 869 (1) 12,426 (1) 537 (0) 1
GLP 13,721 (1) 48,836 (2) 13,088 (1) 5775 (1) 1869 (0) 1850 (0) 8772 (1) 2313 (0) 6546 (1) 8188 (1) 1392 (0) 1
BDP 10,286 (1) 33,464 (2) 9663 (1) 4954 (0) 3204 (0) 1741 (0) 7819 (1) 1404 (0) 2615 (0) 7491 (1) 2274 (0) 0.91
EDU 4759 (0) 4120 (0) 1366 (0) 1279 (0) 3563 (1) 494 (0) 1768 (0) 299 (0) 1559 (0) 8338 (1) 425 (0) 1
Constituency divisor 15,000 24,300 12,900 11,000 7100 7000 13,000 5900 7000 12,000 6000

The “double Pukelsheim” weights the votes at the cantonal level higher than those at the district level. It can happen that party A with fewer votes than party B still receives more mandates. This was the case in the 2009 elections when the GLP in the Baden district received two seats with 30,882 party votes, while the BDP received only one seat with 41,512 party votes.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Staehelin: History of the Canton of Aargau 1830–1885. P. 103.
  2. ↑ Seiler, Steigmeier: History of the Aargau. P. 157.
  3. ↑ Seiler, Steigmeier: History of the Aargau. P. 199.
  4. ↑ Constitution of the Canton of Aargau  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / Gesetzessammlungen.ag.ch  
  5. ^ Election results in the canton of Aargau
  6. ↑ Incompatibility Act
  7. ↑ Grand Council elections 2020; Allocation of mandates for the 2021/2024 term of office - Canton Aargau. Retrieved November 4, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Allocation of mandates to the districts as of 2016
  9. ↑ Business Transaction Act
  10. ^ Rules of Procedure of the Grand Council
  11. ^ Law on the election of the Grand Council
  12. ↑ Voting results from November 27, 2011 ( memento of the original from September 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ag.ch
  13. ↑ Allocation of seats to the Grand Council elections 2017–2020