Modelling and analysing belief manipulation in conciliation

The ordinary legislative procedure of the European Union concludes with an intercameral dispute settlement body, the Conciliation Committee. This final step of the procedure is crucial to understand the concessions that both the Parliament and the Council are able to extract during bicameral negotiations. In this paper, I develop a model of incomplete information that analyses decision making in the last two stages of the ordinary legislative procedure. The model assumes three actors – the European Parliament, its delegation and the Council – that, having Euclidean preferences with single-peaked utility functions, choose a proposal in the one-dimensional policy space. The incomplete information of the Council vis-à-vis the Parliament provides interesting findings about belief manipulation. It turns out that manipulation occurs when the moderate Parliament is located between the delegation’s ideal policy and the alleged Parliament’s acceptance threshold. Finally, I employ the analytic narrative approach to explaining unique historical events of case studies, drawing upon the model.