In recent years, policymakers in both China and the EU have conducted deliberative pollingexperiments as a way to directly involve citizens in policymaking.While the method is thesame, a closer comparison reveals that the core of the problem it is employed to solve differsbetween China and the EU, causing differences in how the outcomes of deliberative pollingare included in policy decisions.This thesis uses a framework proposed by policy networktheory to demonstrate that the stronger need for citizen input legitimacy in the Chinese case ofZeguo than in the EU case of EuroPolis could be explained as the result of underlying dynamics of resource exchanges between governments and citizens.