The digitalization of organizational communication has triggered the change of the traditional word of mouth into a virtual space, on the one hand, and the transfer of control from the few to the many, and from organizations to publics, on the other hand. This empowerment of consumers and/or citizens places an emphasis on interactivity focused on conversation and on the role of content producer attributed to internet users. The paradigmatic transfer from business-to-consumer monologues or business-to-consumer-to-business dialogues to consumer-to-consumer communication [1 p.134] determined organizations to combine creativity with credibility and visibility with interactivity. The ,,bottom-up” strategy has also been adopted by public organizations, and even European institutions. The European Commission has had a new approach to earn people’s interest and trust by applying the principles of subsidiarity and decentralization [2]. This approach has focused on listening, communicating and connecting with citizens by ,,going local”. The European e-platforms (Europa, Futurum, Debating Europe etc.) have gradually introduced the debate within the European online public sphere, thus providing a new insight into Bakhtin's participatory dialogue and heteroglossia [3]. Nowadays the online subsidiarity through which the European citizen is empowered has become more salient within the context of digitalization and it allows the development of a new form of European citizenship. One important aspect that needs to be addressed within this new context where e-citizens have become prosumers of information is the type(s) of approaches to their online (de)legitimation strategies. In our paper we want to develop an integrated qualitative approach which will have as main input communication strategies (credit claiming, credit granting, admitting mistakes, blame shifting or requesting others, [4]) combined with a qualitative textual data analysis software (QDA Miner). This integrated approach will allow us to provide a conceptual mapping of the conceptual nodes and conceptual flows for a debate suggested by European citizens and for the responses offered by policymakers. In order to illustrate how this integrated approach to (de)legitimation strategies works, we will use as corpus of our research the ‘Brexit’ issue debated by e-citizens on the ‘Debating Europe’ platform. Acknowledgement: This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research and Innovation, CNCS-UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-RU-TE-2014-4-0599.