During the late Ottoman Empire, some elements of government were democratized. Seven general elections were held for the Chamber of Deputies, the popularly elected lower house of the General Assembly, the Ottoman parliament, two in the First Constitutional Era (1877–1878), and five in the Second Constitutional Era (1908–1920). The Chamber of Deputies used Ottoman electoral law. Local elections were held for provincial (Vilayet) assemblies, though they quickly fell out of fashion. In addition, Armenian, Protestant, and Jewish millets had their own assemblies: an Armenian National Assembly, a Protestant General Assembly, and a Jewish General Assembly, which held millet wide elections, with varying degrees of suffrage granted to laity outside Istanbul.
Before the Tanzimat, villages had long elected mukhtars, and for minorities: local ethnarchs, or kocabaşı.