It was established in August 1881, in Ruma, by Pavle Jovanović and other affluent Serbs.
[1] The party at first worked in concert with the Hungarian interests in Croatia, led by ban Károly Khuen-Héderváry.
[1] In 1903, however, under its new leader Svetozar Pribićević it started to collaborate with Croatian parties.
After World War I, in 1919 its members mostly joined the Yugoslav Democratic Party in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, created by a merger of a wide range of political parties and coalitions, the one from Croatia being the Croato-Serb coalition.
The individualism of the SNSS[citation needed] members, though, was never fully erased, and in 1924 most of the former members left JDS and formed the Independent Democratic Party, under the same leadership of the SNSS[citation needed] (president Svetozar Pribicevic).