A case study of an agency's rulemaking for the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act: Format matters

This study examines participation in rulemaking, an important and often controversial function of federal administrative agencies, for the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 (NLEA). The research identifies the determinants of participation in policy making for the NLEA and clarifies whether and, if so, how participation made a difference in the rules for the format to be used for the NLEA. The NLEA was enacted in recognition of new knowledge about the relationship between diet and disease and in response to demands from the U.S. public, citizen and interest organizations. The foundation for this study is a dataset of 5678 written comments on 9 food labeling dockets, gathered by FDA during rulemaking from 1884 organizations, as well as comments from individual respondents. Logistic and linear regression analyses are used to test the hypotheses that participation in rulemaking is a function of an organization's resources, i.e., the size of its membership, the number of employees, budget, annual sales and a function of its credibility, measured as age of the organization. The results provide support for an association between an organization's participation in rulemaking and the number of employees and size of its annual sales.