A recent crop of “revisionist Tanzimat” scholarship in the last decade and a half shows that constitutionalism and political reform mattered throughout the Ottoman Empire far more than previously understood. Ottomans in the provinces, non-Muslims, and the non-elite are now understood to have engaged with, embraced, altered, and challenged central concepts and tools in the transformation of imperial political life. One of the central questions that begs further study surrounds “representation” – who merited selection or later election to the two Ottoman parliaments and local councils, who they represented, and on what basis this representative bargain was founded. This paper examines these questions in the two key moments of the establishment of the first and second parliaments (1876 and 1908), and across imperial space. By examining the Arabic-language Christian and Muslim press (in Beirut and Cairo) as well as the multi-lingual Jewish press in various locales (Istanbul, Salonica, Jerusalem), and drawing on secondary scholarship on other religious and linguistic communities, this paper teases out how different communities and regions envisioned their role/s –and their voice/s— in the parliament and by extension, in Ottoman political life. Although there was some trans-confessional consensus on the desired and necessary qualities of an imperial representative, there also emerged several tensions surrounding his role representing the ethno-religious community, the province, and the empire as a whole.