Talk:3rd Chamber of Deputies of the Ottoman Empire

The state of this article and help wanted

As the main contributor to this list article and the 4th and 5th chamber of deputies, I have to admit that many of the political affiliations that I assigned in this article is mainly a lot of detective work. The main source of this list: Feroz Ahmad's "İkinci Meşrütiyet Dönemi Meclisler" (Second Constitutional Era Parliaments), features a list of all the deputies that participated in the Second Constitutional Era which includes their political affiliations. In fact, this is a big problem in academia relating to the Second Constitutional Era: There is no consistent conclusion on the political affiliations of the deputies elected to the Ottoman parliaments. I will go through the various conclusions thrown around on the exact political make up of the 1908 Ottoman parliament.

Some sources say that the CUP won 274/275 seats in 1908 (Shaw from the top of my head), but I can confidently assert that this isn't accurate at all. It is well known that parties like Dashnak, Hunchak won four and two seats respectively, and the Bulgarian parties won seats as well. Even if this number refers to a broad electoral alliance made up of the CUP and various ethnic parties, we know that K. Zohrab (Ist.), P. Kozmidi (Ist.), and Mahir Said (Ank.) were elected on the Ahrar Party's list (published in the Servet-i Funun), meaning that at least three Ahrar deputies were able to get in to the parliament, not one. Ine of the biggest conflicts between the 274/275 result and Ahmad's result is that Ahmad asserts that many deputies were actually independent (one can see this quite clearly in the Arab provinces).

This assessment also severely contradicts Ahmad's model, who actually puts an effort in figuring out party loyalties, but also falls flat in making an accurate model. Ahmad asserts that much more deputies than the previously mentioned three were elected on the Ahrar Party's list, including many Albanian nationalists and even the Sharif of Mecca and his son Abdullah. The respective wikipedia articles of these deputies don't say much about the Sharif of Mecca's time in parliament, nor their political affiliation, just that he was an anti-Unionist. Albanian Nationalists like Qemali were definitely not elected on the Ahrar Party's list, though he definitely had a leadership position in the party (presumably after 1908). This leads to another criticism of mine against Ahmad: that the labels he assigns to the deputies in his work reflect more political tendencies than party loyalty, and his model doesn't account for party switching. Take the example of Gumulcineli Ismail Hakki, who Ahmad puts as an Ahrar/Freedom and Accord member, but he was actually elected on the CUP list in 1908 but jumped ship to Freedom and Accord in 1912.

Yet another problem with exists with Ahmad's work is types of categories he assigned. Ahmad only gives four categories of political affiliation: Unionist, Ahrar/Freedom and Accord, Socialist, and Independent. The problem is that we know that there was a much larger range of political parties represented than this, for example we know Dashnak + Hunchak won four and two seats respectively, but Ahmad's list doesn't represent Dashnak/Hunchak. Though I have been able to identify the four Dashnak deputies elected in 1908 (which he lists as independent), this required a lot of time, research, and in some cases, guess work. D. Vlahov (Sal.) was listed as a socialist even though he was elected on the People's Federative Party lists, and S. Stoyanovic (Pris.) was listed as a Liberal even though he was elected on the Serbian Democratic League list.

What I am trying to say is that this list is an estimation which takes lots of independent research and sketchy deductive In short, 274/275 deputies belonging from the CUP in the 1908 parliament not at all accurate, but nor is Ahmad's assessments of political affiliation accurate either.

This is a lot of rambling about my frustrations with the inconsistencies researching this topic (some of which might be incoherent), but if you got this far, this is where a more understandable call to action comes about.

With these errors/nuances, a lot of research is needed to produce a precise and accurate model of the 1908 parliament on wikipedia to ensure that the parties each one of these deputies were elected from are correct. Though I have been able to get this far by myself, I have hit a wall as English/easily translatable sources are running out, so I need your guys help.

One that that needs to be done is to turn these black names into blue links. The names of the deputies in Ahmad's work (which I ported into this article) are spelt in Turkish (which I can read), but this makes the spellings of Greek, Arab, Bulgarian, etc names of deputies in Ahmad's list (and in this article) very different to how they are spelt/transliterated in English, making it hard to find biographies of these non-Turkish deputies on wikipedia and google to get more information about them. Therefore: if you are active in the Greek, Bulgarian, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, etc wikipedias, or their respective communities in the English wikipedia, if you are active in translating articles, if you are familiar in the non-Turkish history of the Second Constitutional Era it would be greatly appreciated if you can find some articles of these deputies (wikipedia or not), and turn them blue. Doing so allows access to their story so we can confirm or change their party loyalties. To this extent, the 1912 and 1914 parliaments are definitely innacurate to some degree, and can use some skepticism too.

In terms of some smaller pieces of detective work fellow wikipedia contributors can help out with for this list of the 1908 parliament: I have identified Hampartsoum Boyadjian as one of the two Hunchakian deputies, but haven't been able to find who the second one is. Also the Serbian version of the Serb Democratic League article says that three deputies were elected to the Ottoman parliament in 1908. I have identified Sava Stoyanovic as one of them, who are the other two? Benlittlewiki (talk) 22:41, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

@Benlittlewiki I did put another reliable source (Kansu, 2000) which is focused on the post-revolutionary period and paid close attention to the 1912 election. Kansu confirms that only one Serb MP was present in the 1908-1912 legislature. I am dealing with some well-known Albanians of the same period and I can not expand my work on such articles due to the time available, but can still help with resources related if you wish to continue working on expanding and improving these articles. Feel free to contact me via mail. Bes-ARTTalk 12:06, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Thinking of changing Liberty Party affiliations to Independent

I described my issues with this list in "The state of this article and help wanted", and I am giong to try and fix this. I am going to relay on the unsourced tidbit of information in the Ottoman Liberty Party article that only Kozmidi, Zohrab, and Mahir were elected from Liberty Party's list in 1908. Therefore, I am thinking of changing the classification of every presently listed Ahrar deputy except those three as elected independents. Unless there is well sourced opposition, I will go through this motion in around a week. Benlittlewiki (talk) 04:49, 7 November 2021 (UTC)