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The role of design in innovation processes is a trendy topic in current debates on business development and competitiveness. Design activities and methods are to be adopted by firms and companies in order to fully exploit their potential and survive in a highly competitive globalized market. There is a great focus on the capability of design processes to integrate business and societal goals in the definition of new products, services, and instruments in response to the great challenges facing the contemporary world. Design has grown in appeal by identifying itself with a series of tools and codified processes and approaches, which manage to face complexity while cultivating an action/solution oriented approach (Scholl 1995). Nevertheless, design and innovation are multifaceted/manifold concepts that need to be explored and understood in their full spectrum: What do we consider innovation? How do innovation processes work? What design approaches better contribute to innovation

This article analyzes whether expenditure on the provision of merit goods, culture, health, education, and sports, by local governments, in medium-sized cities (between 20,000 and 100,000 inhabitants) is tied to the electoral cycle; that is, whether expenditure increases in the run up to an electoral process. Further, we analyze whether the increase in spending on Culture by local governments has any significant effect on the probability of local governments being re-elected. To answer these questions, a database of 350 medium-sized municipalities is used comprising the period 2011 to 2019, when two municipal elections were held in Spain; in 2015 and in 2019. The results confirm that both total spending and spending on culture and sports, are tied to the electoral cycle, while expenditure on other merit goods is not. Moreover, using a logit model, it is confirmed that an increase in culture expenditure has a significant effect on the probability of the government being re-elected. Specifically, a one-third increase in cultural expenditure, as a proportion of total expenditure (e.g., passing from 6% to 8%) at local government level, improves re-election chances by almost 10%.

INTRODUCCIÓN 1Desde que George Gallup fundara el American Institute of Public Opinion y pronosticara 1 Deseamos agradecer las sugerencias y comentarios recibidos de tres revisores anónimos y del Consejo Edi-el triunfo de Roosevelt sobre Landon en las elecciones presidenciales de Estados Unidos de 1936, el uso de los métodos de muestreo se ha convertido en una herramienta fundatorial de REIS. Jose M. Pavía agradece la fi nanciación del MICINN a través del proyecto CSO2009-11246, «Estructura Social, Encuestas y Predicciones Electorales».