Seen but not empowered: discursive construction of citizen agency in the European Parliament’s crisis communication (2011–2025)

In times of crises, communicating citizen agency can stimulate engagement, support effective governance and legitimacy. Yet, little is known about how the European Parliament – as the only directly elected EU institution and a central site for contesting democratic legitimacy in the Union – constructs citizens’ roles in such moments. This article introduces a novel Actor’s Agency Model that maps agency along two dimensions and applies it to more than a decade of its crisis-related press releases and X/Twitter posts (2011–2025). Our findings show that while citizen visibility has grown, this has rarely meant attributing them a capacity to act in crises. Press releases overwhelmingly cast citizens as passive, instrumentalising them to sustain institutional self-legitimation. X posts more often assign active roles, but primarily through forms that do not amount to substantive participation. Such patterns risk undermining EU legitimacy by sidelining those whose involvement is essential to democratic crisis governance.