AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

This project deals about the rejection of the food traffic light labelling by the European Parliament. The traffic light was meant to indicate the nutritional information (regarding sugar, salt, fat and saturated fat) in a coloured way, in which red represented high amounts of certain content, yellow represented a medium amount and green a low amount of one of the above mentioned nutritional amounts. This proposal is part of the wider Commissions Proposal (2008) regarding the nutritional labelling of food. The main interest in this project is to understand the reasons why the EP has rejected the food traffic light and especially to investigate if the rejection was due to business lobbyist influence. The later point is the main focus of this project. In order to answer the question, the method of preference attainment will be used. Using this method, the preferences of the business interest groups will be compared against the adopted European Parliament legislative resolution (first reading). Besides this, the input from an anti-Lobby NGO will be used as well in order to increase the validity. The theoretical perspective of this paper will be rational choice theory from Pollack and Scharpf. In addition the findings from Greenwood and Michalowitz will be used to complement the theoretical part. In the end of this paper, the analysis will show that it is very likely to assume that the European Parliament has been influenced by Business interest groups and has also adopted their proposal regarding nutritional labelling. The project will end with a summarising conclusion and with a few afterthoughts.