116 8. Mexico: intra-state government in Mexico Ady Carrera and Andrew Nickson INTRODUCTION Mexico is a federal nation with three tiers of government: the federal gov- ernment; 31 states; and Mexico City and 2449 municipalities. Despite the formally federal structure of governance, the country has long been regarded as one of the most politically centralised in Latin America. The leaders of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 called for ‘free municipali- ties’, municipios libres, with freedom to remove the controls imposed through the Napoleonic prefectural system. This aspiration was opposed in the con- stitutional assembly, when deputies engineered a compromise which ensured that Article 115 of the 1917 Constitution deliberately granted municipalities an ill-defined status. Local government was subsequently subsumed within the corporativist system led by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which monopolised the political life of the country at all levels until the 1990s. The PRI adopted a highly centralised model of intergovernmental relations under which the federal government, headed by a powerful presidency, controlled virtually every aspect of the operations of state and local governments (Nickson 1995). A series of later constitutional reforms strengthened the powers of the federal government while reducing those of the states (Fierro 2020). This situation only began to change as a result of a democratisation process from the late 1980s when other political parties began to win elections to major municipalities and state governments. In 2000 Mexico elected its first president who did not belong to the PRI. The 31 states of the union have three branches of governance – executive, legislative and judicial – mirroring that of the federal government. Although the Federal Constitution establishes that the states are autonomous, the con- stitution of each state replicates the Federal Constitution, while adding some specific state articles, which must not contradict federal law. States are entitled to freely organise their own system of public administration, to control recruit-