State governments of Mexico are those sovereign governments formed in each Mexican state.
State governments in Mexico are structured according to each state's constitution and modeled after the federal system, with three branches of government — executive, legislative, and judicial — and formed based on the congressional system. On the other hand, Mexico's central federal government represents the United Mexican States before international bodies such as the United Nations.
A Mexican State (Spanish: Estado), officially a Free and Sovereign State (Spanish: Estado libre y soberano), is a constituent federative entity of Mexico according to the Constitution of Mexico. Currently there are 31 states, each with its own constitution, government, state governor, and state congress. In the hierarchy of Mexican administrative divisions, states are further divided into municipalities. Currently there are 2,462 municipalities in Mexico.
Although not formally a state, political reforms have enabled Mexico City (Spanish: Ciudad de México), the capital city of the United Mexican States to have a federative entity status equivalent to that of the states since January 29, 2016.
The politics of Mexico function within the framework of the federal presidential representative democratic republic whose government is based on a multi-party congressional system, where the President of Mexico is both head of state and head of government. The federal government represents the United Mexican States. It is divided into three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial, established by the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States, published in 1917. The constituent states of the federation must also have a republican government based on a congressional system established by their respective constitutions.
Executive power is exercised by the executive branch, headed by the President, who is advised by a cabinet of secretaries independent of the legislature. Legislative power is vested in the Congress of the Union, a two-chamber legislature comprising the Senate of the Republic and the Chamber of Deputies. Judicial power is exercised by the judiciary, consisting of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, the Council of the Federal Judiciary, and the collegiate, unitary, and district tribunals.
The intrastate regions (Spanish: regiones), and sometimes districts (Spanish: distritos) are collections of municipalities in a Mexican state that are grouped together to support the administration of the state government and are not regulated by the Constitution of Mexico. The reasons for such a grouping include simplicity of administration and keeping statistics, politics, as well as geographic relationship (such as being part of a particular valley.)
In Mexican history, a plan was a declaration of principles announced in conjunction with a rebellion, usually armed, against the central government of the country (or, in the case of a regional rebellion, against the state government). Mexican plans were often more formal than the pronunciamientos that were their equivalent elsewhere in Spanish America and Spain. Some were as detailed as the United States Declaration of Independence. Some plans simply announced that the current government was null and void and that the signer of the plan was the new president.
A total of more than one hundred plans were declared. One compendium, Planes políticos, proclamas, manifiestos y otros documentos de la Independencia al México moderno, 1812–1940, compiled by Román Iglesias González (Mexico City: UNAM, 1998), contains the full texts of 105 plans. About a dozen of these are widely considered to be of great importance in discussions of Mexican history.