The European Parliament has a treaty mandate to represent the will of EU citizens. However, our understanding of how the EP reacts to public opinion during the legislative process remains limited. In this paper, we analyze whether and, if so, when citizens’ opinion affects the clarity of position that the EP advances in negotiations with the Council of Ministers. We argue that when public opinion on EU policy integration across the EU member states is divided, the EP will propose less concrete changes to the Commission’s proposals. In contrast, when the views of EU citizens are more united, the EP will use more concrete language. In this way, it can strike a balance between avoiding an image of being disconnected from EU citizens given a divided public and acting as a competent and successful legislature in inter-institutional bargaining in the face of united public opinion. To test our argument, we measure the vagueness of the EPs’ legislative negotiation positions formulated in 2009-2019 using dictionary-based content analysis and draw on the Eurobarometer indicators to measure public polarization. The results support the hypothesis of EP public responsiveness in law-making, which decreases the democratic deficit in the EU