Resumo: As a general rule, Spanish legislation establishes that public administrations must provide public services with their own means and that, only when they lack these, may they outsource the provision of certain services. In this sense, the tourist information service is one of the services that administrations tend to outsource to a greater extent as they require greater time flexibility to meet the needs of tourists. Thus, the overall objective of this study is to analyse the potential influence that certain political factors could have on the propensity to outsource tourist information services at the municipal level. As such, an investigation has been designed that researches the state of tourist information services in the province of Alicante during 2019. The results obtained indicate that there is no greater or lesser propensity to outsource depending on the political party that governs or on the basis of the party that has powers in tourism within the municipal corporation. However, the results indicate that the form of governance does exert an influence, whereby corporations governed by an absolute majority tend to outsource information services to a greater extent than corporations with a coalition government. These results suggest that outsourcing factors might not correspond to the potential cost reductions or improvements in efficiency that some corporations claim as justification for outsourcing such services.
