The sultan remained the theocratic legitimized sovereign to which the state organization was made-to-measure. Thus, despite a de jure intact constitution, the sultan ruled in the absolutist manner. This was particularly evident in the closure of Parliament only eleven months after the declaration of the Constitution. Although the basic rights guaranteed in the constitution were not at all insignificant in Ottoman legal history, they were severely limited by the pronouncements of the ruler. Instead of overcoming sectarian divisions through the institution of universal representation, the elections reinforced the communitarian basis of society by allotting quotas to the various religious communities based on projections of population figures derived from the census of 1844. Furthermore, in order to appease the European powers, the Ottoman administration drafted an exceedingly uneven representational scheme that favored the European provinces by an average 2:1 ratio.