The Presidency of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) functioned as the political-executive organ of the party and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia when the party congress and the Central Committee were adjourned. The presidency underwent several name changes; it was known as the Executive Committee from 1919 to 1921, the Political Bureau (Politburo) from 1921 to 1952, the Executive Committee from 1952 to 1966 and the Presidency from 1966 until the adjournment of the 14th Congress in 1990. Foreign observers often referred to the presidency as the presidium, in analogy with similar bodies like the Soviet Communist Party Presidium, as Yugoslavia had nominally been a Soviet ally before the Tito-Stalin split.

Until 1966, the LCY was a unitary organisation in which the central party leadership alone controlled cadre appointments and national policy. At the apex of this system was the presidency. This system was reformed after the purge of Josip Broz Tito's long-standing heir apparent Aleksandar Ranković and replaced with a system of equal representation of the LCY's constitutive branches in its presidency. From 1969, each republican LC branch had two representatives and one ex officio member, each autonomous province had one representative and one ex officio member, and the League of Communists Organisation in the Yugoslav People's Army had one ex officio member. In this system, Tito, the LCY leader from 1939 to his death on 4 May 1980, was the only member of the presidency who was not elected to represent a constitutive branch of the LCY, and was an ex officio member through his office of president of the LCY Central Committee. Upon his death, the LCY presidency was abolished and replaced with the office of President of the Presidency of the LCY Central Committee. Officeholders were limited to one-year terms and the offices annually rotated between the LCY's constitutive branches. This was a system of collective leadership, and the presidency president worked with the secretary of the Presidency of the LCY Central Committee, which had a two-year term limit and rotated between the LCY's constitutive branches. The LCY president presided over the work of the presidency and, with the presidency's secretary, set the agenda and organised its sessions.

The post-Tito system of collective leadership succeeded in spreading power, though it was widely argued these reforms weakened the federal party organs at the expense of those of the LCY's branches. Following the 1989 fall of communism in most of Eastern Europe and heightened conflict within the LCY on ethnic lines, the LCY split at its 14th Congress, which was held on 20–22 January 1990. The Congress was adjourned and did not reconvene before May 1990; during the interval, the constituent Leagues in Macedonia, Slovenia and Croatia had left the LCY. On 26 May 1990, the 14th LCY Congress elected the Committee for the Preparation of the Congress of Democratic and Programmatic Renewal of the LCY Central Committee to function as a provisional leadership with the task of convening the 15th LCY Congress, which was never convened. The committee, the last federal organ of the LCY, dissolved itself on 22 January 1991.

The presidency represented the LCY domestically and abroad. It was chiefly responsible for organising and implementing the LCY Central Committee's work and programmes. Decision-making in the presidency, especially after Tito's death, was based on consensus and not decision by majority. All members of the presidency were of equal standing, including the presidency's president and secretary, and had equal responsibilities for implementing the presidency's decisions. Members had the right to speak freely on any topic at its session but could not publicly broadcast dissenting views without the presidency's consent.

History Formation and the Tito–Stalin split: 1919–1966 The 1st Congress of the LCY was held from 20 to 23 April 1919 and established the Socialist Labour Party of Yugoslavia (Communists). The party adopted a statute that stated that the executive committee functioned as the central committee's operational body. The 3rd LCY Congress, which was held from 14 to 22 May 1926, changed the body's name to the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, which was abbreviated to Politburo. The LCY leadership, including its politburo, was dismissed by the Communist International in April 1928, and a new politburo was elected following the 4th Congress, which was held from 3 to 15 November 1928. The most powerful politburo members concurrently served as members of the Secretariat and collectively held the title Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.

Until 1948, informal norms often trumped formal decision-making institutions, which remained weak and underdeveloped. For instance, Josip Broz Tito was elected to the politburo in 1934 and was later elected to the central committee. According to party statutes, only central committee members could serve in the politburo. The politburo was also formally held accountable to the party's central committee but from October 1940 to 12 April 1948, the Central Committee of the 4th Congress did not convene; during this period, the politburo ran the party in the name of the central committee.

On 8 December 1936, the office of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was established, and it chaired the politburo and central committee meetings. As general secretary, Tito had considerable influence over the selection of the central committee and its politburo. During the 1940s, Tito began abrogating the politburo's responsibilities and centralised power in his own hands. According to Aleksandar Ranković, a member of both the politburo and the secretariat, exchanges between the Yugoslav party and its counterparts in Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Slovenia, Switzerland and the Soviet Union were hidden from the politburo. Upon asking Tito at a politburo session to publicise this information to the attendees, Tito responded: "I am the secretary general of the party. I have the right to decide what to tell you and the others." The party secretaries Tito, Ranković, Edvard Kardelj and Milovan Djilas, who comprised the secretariat, had considerable informal influence on the politburo. They would often decide on policies before meetings and get the politburo to rubber stamp them. These power relations remained intact until the dissolution of the secretariat in 1966.

According to Ranković, the statute adopted by the 5th Congress in 1948, "was by and large a copy of the Statute of the Soviet Communist Party". As a result of the Tito–Stalin split, a conflict in which the Soviet political leadership accused the Yugoslav communists of breaking with communism, the LCY began questioning the Soviet model and its suitability for Yugoslavia. The LCY began to stealthily move towards more democracy and the decentralisation of socio-political life. This trend was first confirmed at the 5th Session of the Central Committee of the 5th Congress on 27 May 1952, and later that year at the 6th Congress, which was held from 3 to 7 November. The congress changed the party's name from Communist Party of Yugoslavia to League of Communists of Yugoslavia; according to Tito: "in view of the fact that the role of the Party at this stage of our social development changed to a certain extent ... the word Party is no longer adequate". It was argued designating the LCY as the leading force in society was wrong and accordingly, the 6th Congress stated instead the party "mobilises and moves the broadest masses of the people to action by political and organisational means, so that its struggle and achievements make it a leader". These changes did not affect the LCY's internal organisation or democratic centralism. The Politburo's name was changed to the Executive Committee and the Secretariat was made responsible to it rather than to the Central Committee.

The decentralisation of power: 1966–1978

The institutional framework established at the 6th Congress in 1952 lasted until the 5th Session of the Central Committee of the 8th Congress on 4 October 1966. On 1 July 1966, at the 4th Session of the Central Committee of the 8th Congress, the LCY purged Tito's presumed successor Aleksandar Ranković, the Vice President of Yugoslavia and the head of the State Security Administration, for allegedly bugging Tito's bedroom. To reduce the over-centralisation of power in key individuals, the same session established the 40-member Commission for the Reorganisation and Further Development of the LCY (CRFD–LCY), which was headed by Mijalko Todorović, to recommend party organisational reform. The commission proposed radical measures; Mitja Ribičič proposed abandoning democratic centralism and Krste Crvenkovski talked of the possibility of a non-party democracy and the coming dissolution of the LCY. In September that year, Tito responded by stating neither of these proposals would be debated.

At the 5th Session, the CRFD–LCY proposed abolishing the office of LCY general secretary and replacing it with a President of the LCY Central Committee. On their recommendation, the Executive Committee and the Secretariat were abolished and replaced with two new bodies, the presidency and a new executive committee. The presidency was to be headed by the president while the executive committee was led by a secretary. The executive committee was to execute the presidency's policies and the presidency was to formulate policies. According to the CRFD–LCY, the reorganisation was intended to "put an end to, or at least to reduce to a minimum the danger of monopoly and concentration of competencies". Following the decentralisation of socio-economic life that began with the Tito–Stalin split, the commission proposed to institute a fixed system of representation in the presidency and the executive committee. In the presidency, the League of Communists of Serbia (LC Serbia) and the League of Communists of Croatia (LC Croatia) were each represented by nine members; the League of Communists of Slovenia (LC Slovenia) and the League of Communists of Bosnia-Herzegovina (LC Bosnia-Herzegovina) each with seven members; League of Communists of Macedonia (LC Macedonia) and the League of Communists of Montenegro (LC Montenegro) each with six members; and the League of Communists of Kosovo (LC Kosovo) and the League of Communists of Vojvodina (LC Vojvodina) had one representative each. It was also made clear the presidency and the executive committee were accountable to the sessions of the LCY Central Committee.

According to Todorović, many commission members feared the reorganisation was insufficient to halt the centralisation of power and that the presidency would do the same as the former executive committee. This fear was confirmed by the reelection of 17 of 18 former executive committee members to the presidency. Fourteen members of the reorganisation commission were also elected to the presidency, and these members may have wanted to implement their own reformist proposals. The reorganisation of the former executive committee and the decentralisation of the appointment of mid-level cadres from the centre to the republican leaderships considerably weakened the new presidency's influence. The delineation of functions between the presidency and the executive committee did not work as planned; the two bodies convened joint sessions rather than working separately. This, combined with the normalisation of term limits and elections in place of the appointment of cadres, also weakened the central party authorities.