Constitutional Assembly elections were held in the recently proclaimed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later renamed Yugoslavia) on 28 November 1920. The election was held in the context of political debate over the degree of centralisation or potential federalisation of Yugoslavia. The election was held in the entire territory of the country except the areas obtained shortly beforehand through the Treaty of Rapallo which regulated the borders with Italy because those areas were still under Italian occupation. The election legislation was enacted by the Temporary National Representation, a representative body appointed after creation of Yugoslavia. The legislation prescribed the universal manhood suffrage, except for Hungarian and German minorities, certain former Ottoman Empire nationals and Jews.
A total of 22 political parties or groups fielded candidates in 55 electoral districts which were determined based on pre-First World War censuses. Varying degrees of wartime losses and the suffrage regulations led to significant differences in the number of registered voters per parliamentary seat. There was a 65% voter turnout for the election. None of the parties won a majority of the 419 seats available. The Democratic Party (DS) and the People's Radical Party (NRS) emerged as the largest factions, winning 92 and 91 seats respectively. The third-most successful party at the election was the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ), winning 58 seats, followed by the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS) receiving 50 seats. The HSS was the only party to win an absolute majority in any province. Thus it became the leading Croatian political party.
The DS-NRS government failed to secure the needed majority in the assembly that would support the adoption of its draft constitution. The government therefore sought and obtained support from the Yugoslav Muslim Organization, the Džemijet, and a faction of the Agrarian Party in exchange for favourable terms of the pending land reform in interwar Yugoslavia. These alliances, aided by the government-determined rules of order of the Constitutional Assembly requiring a simple majority of all members of the assembly, led to the adoption of the Vidovdan Constitution as the first Yugoslav constitution. The DS and the NRS positions were brought closer together in the struggle against anti-centralist parties.
The rule requiring only the simple majority of votes was opposed by the parties whose objective was to prevent the centralisation of Yugoslavia. The HSS and other Croatian parties claimed that the Corfu Declaration agreed on by the Kingdom of Serbia and the Yugoslav Committee in 1917 required a qualified majority. They expected the constitution to be adopted by a two-thirds majority, and the Croats perceived the government-adopted rules as a betrayal. Subsequently, the HSS decided not to take part in the Constitutional Assembly and declared its position that the constitution would not be binding for Croats or Croatia. The KPJ attracted a significant protest vote, and a series of KPJ-led protests prompted the government to issue Obznana decree significantly curbing KPJ activities. In turn, the KPJ also left the parliament before the constitution was voted on. The Slovene People's Party left the assembly soon after.
Background
The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later renamed Yugoslavia) was proclaimed by Prince Regent Alexander on 1 December 1918. The proclamation was made following a request by a delegation of the National Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, representing the South Slavs living in territories once belonging to Austria-Hungary. The delegation received instructions requiring the establishment of a federation, but the delegation ignored the instructions. Following the proclamation, the Prince Regent appointed a government consisting of the Serb-dominated centralist parties, specifically the Democratic Party (DS) and the People's Radical Party (NRS). The Prince Regent appointed and confirmed subsequent governments. Before the 1920 election, the cabinet of Milenko Vesnić was appointed. It was replaced by the Nikola Pašić cabinet before the Constitutional Assembly was convened. The Temporary National Representation was established as an interim parliament, which primarily consisted of appointed members. The Temporary National Representation was meant to enact electoral law for the future Constitutional Assembly.
By the time of proclamation of Yugoslavia, the system of government in the state was largely undecided. Representatives of the Kingdom of Serbia and the Yugoslav Committee, an ad-hoc group claiming to represent the South Slavs living in Austria-Hungary, had agreed in the 1917 Corfu Declaration that Yugoslavia would be a monarchy with the House of Karađorđević as its head, with the question of the level of centralisation to be decided later on. In November 1918, representatives of the Yugoslav Committee, joined by the National Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, negotiated with the representatives of Serbia on the question of centralisation. This council produced the Geneva Declaration, an agreement that Yugoslavia would be a confederation with a central government with limited powers. The Serbian government rejected this agreement because it wanted to establish a more centralised state serving Serbian political interests better.
Another issue was the Adriatic question, that is, the uncertainty regarding the borders of Yugoslavia. This arose from Italian claims based on the 1915 Treaty of London and the Fiume question, and was not addressed before the 1920 Treaty of Rapallo. The terms of the treaty were not fulfilled immediately. Instead, the Allied occupation of the eastern Adriatic, including the region of Dalmatia, remained in place until September 1921.
Electoral system
The Temporary National Representation adopted the Election Act on 2 September 1920. The election law prescribed the universal suffrage for men over the age of 21 who were enrolled in the voter register. The law restricted the voting right to nationals of Serbia or Montenegro before 1 December 1918, citizens of Croatia-Slavonia or Dalmatia, and residents of Bosnia and Herzegovina and other territories included in Yugoslavia. The law also gave the right to vote to other Slavs residing in Yugoslavia, effectively numerous refugees from Russia, but also confirmed the right of Slavic and Albanian minorities to vote.
Ethnic Germans, Italians, and Hungarians living in Yugoslavia were not allowed to vote. The same applied to former Ottoman nationals, who had been residents in territories that became Yugoslav and left before November 1915. Furthermore, the right to vote was denied to the Jews unless they declared themselves Serbs or Croats or if the local authorities deemed them Serbs or Croats. Yugoslav authorities claimed that state security concerns justified the denial of voting rights. The denial of the right to vote was in breach of the obligations Yugoslavia assumed under the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The voting rights were also denied to convicted prisoners, people stripped of their civil rights, and certain religious minorities such as Jehovah's Witnesses. The legislation also determined the method of compilation of electoral registers, specifying that one had to reside in a particular place for six months to be admitted to the register.
Candidates had to be eligible to vote, literate, permanently residing in Yugoslavia for at least ten years, and over 25. A candidate was allowed to stand in election in up to three different districts simultaneously and, if successful in multiple districts, had to pick one and withdraw in others. Candidate lists were put forward for each electoral district, needing a hundred endorsements to be valid. Candidates having university-level or equivalent education to be "qualified candidates". The law required the ratio of qualified to ordinary candidates in each district to be at least 1:4, with at least one candidate in the list being qualified.
Voters cast secret ballots. Using rubber balls dropped into the appropriate boxes, voting was performed to indicate support for a specific candidate or candidate list. The method was adopted from Serbian pre-war electoral law, selected to accommodate many illiterate voters.
Electoral districts
There were 55 electoral districts nationwide, defined differently depending on the province. Southern Serbia (corresponding primarily to present-day Kosovo and Northern Macedonia) and Bosnia and Herzegovina were used as the electoral districts in Serbia. In Croatia-Slavonia, the county borders determined the electoral districts. In Vojvodina (consisting of Bačka, Banat, and Baranja), Slovenia and Dalmatia judicial districts were the basis for the electoral districts. Montenegro was a single electoral district. Major cities, like Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana, were placed in special urban districts to avoid having numerous rural voters in districts containing urban centres. The large cities were awarded a disproportionately high number of seats in the parliament compared to other parts of the country, and the number of registered voters per candidate varied there as well: there were 2,737 registered voters per candidate in Belgrade, but 4,954 in Zagreb.
The number of candidates in each district was determined based on the 1910 census as one candidate per 30,000 residents. An additional candidate was assigned if there were 17,000 or more left without a candidate. The number of registered voters per candidate also varied between the provinces. This ranged from 3,301 in Vojvodina to 8,092 in Dalmatia. These discrepancies resulted from using the prewar census to establish the number of candidates. They were explained as compensation to Serbia for its wartime losses. (During the war, Serbia lost a third of its male population while Croatia's population rose significantly.)
Campaign
Yugoslav authorities formally declared the freedom to campaign before the elections. This meant that restrictions on holding political rallies, previously in force in Slovenia and Croatia-Slavonia, were abolished. In addition, the provincial government of Bosnia and Herzegovina issued an order prohibiting administrative bodies from interfering with the election. However, police authorities received confidential instructions from the central government to disperse election rallies where dissent or protest against the government might be voiced. Because of this, the HSS was not allowed to hold public gatherings to promote its programme until just before the election day. HSS leader Stjepan Radić, who called for establishment of Yugoslavia as a federal republic, was imprisoned for his political activities during the entire election period and amnestied on the day of the election. The HSS benefited politically from its identification with the peasants' concerns in a predominantly rural country, including identification with the 1920 Croatian Peasant Rebellion that took place in September.
It was not uncommon for government officials to campaign on behalf of the DS. Abuses of office included issuing orders to the heads of municipalities and villages to rally people to DS events. In the run-up to the election, most cases of public display of discontent were organised by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ). The party hoped to attract those who might otherwise cast protest votes.
Results
None of the parties received a majority of the votes in the election. The DS and the NRS performed the best, receiving nearly 20% and 18% of the vote, respectively. The NRS achieved the best result in Serbia, closely followed by the DS, which also performed well in Southern Serbia and Montenegro. The HSS received the third-highest votes: just over 14% nationwide and more than 52% in Croatia-Slavonia, the only province in which the party ran. The HSS was the only party that won a majority of votes in any Yugoslav province.
In the fourth position was the KPJ at just over 12% of votes nationwide. Regionally significant results were achieved by the Yugoslav Muslim Organization (JMO) winning plurality of votes in Bosnia and Herzegovina (33%). The coalition of the Slovene People's Party (SLS) and the Croatian Popular Party (HPS) won a plurality in Slovenia (37%) and Dalmatia (28%). The KPJ won the plurality of votes in Montenegro (38%). The DS won a plurality of votes in Southern Serbia (41%), the NRS in Vojvodina (47%). In Serbia, the NRS received 34% of votes, slightly outperforming the DS with 32%.
The single transferable vote system was applied to distribute the parliament seats. The system was applied separately to the ordinary and qualified candidates. This created a bias favouring best-performing parties, giving them a greater portion of the seats than they would have received otherwise. Out of 22 political parties and groups whose candidates had run for office, 16 won at least one seat. Out of 419 assembly seats, the DS and the NRS received 92 and 91 seats, respectively. The KPJ won 58 seats and the HSS 50.
Turnout
According to the census taken shortly after the election, nearly 12 million people lived in Yugoslavia. Out of that number, there were only 2,480,623 registered voters. And out of that number, 1,607,255 voted, representing an average turnout of 65%. The highest turnout was observed in Slovenia (73.5%), and Bosnia and Herzegovina (70%), while the lowest turnout was recorded in Serbia and Dalmatia (56% each).
The election was not held in the territories under Italian occupation in Rijeka area. Similarly, even though Dalmatia was organised initially into two electoral districts (one encompassing the territory within the jurisdiction of district courts in Split, Dubrovnik, and Kotor, and the other covering the jurisdiction of the district courts in Zadar and Šibenik), the latter was under Italian occupation and the first election did not take place there before 1923.