Commissioned Book Review: Francesco Grillo and Raffaella Y Nanetti, Democracy and Growth in the Twenty-First Century: The Diverging Cases of China and Italy
| Author | Tian He |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1478929920901655 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Reviews |
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(2) NP13 –NP14
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
901655PSW0010.1177/1478929920901655Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2020
Commissioned Book Review
Democracy and Growth in the Twenty-First
Century: The Diverging Cases of China and
Italy by Francesco Grillo and Raffaella Y
Nanetti. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 286
pp., $119.99 (hardcover), $89.00 (e-Book), ISBN
9783030020132
In the last three decades, western liberal democ-
racies, epitomised by the European Union (EU)
and the United States, have been trapped in eco-
nomic stagnation. In contrast, the largest devel-
opmental autocracy – China – has made
remarkable economic progress. In this book,
political economists, Francesco Grillo and
Raffaella Y. Nanetti, explore why the West, the
leader of previous industrial revolutions, is
increasingly lagging behind the East in terms of
generating prosperity in the current era.
Grillo and Nanetti locate the root of the
decreased performance of the West in the west-
ern liberal democratic system. Calling for a
rethinking of the traditional implementation of
democracy that is ‘no longer adequate in this
new century’ (p. 13), the authors refer to democ-
racy as something not simply about elections,
but a form of collective decision-making about
‘collecting – through a continuous, multidirec-
tional consultation – dispersed intelligence so
that more informed, effective policies can be
designed and implemented’ (p. 2). They thus
argue that it is the malfunctioning of this collec-
tive decision-making mechanism that had led to
the sluggish economic performance of western
liberal democracies.
To explain the context in which the crisis of
liberal democracy occurs in the modern era of
Internet usage, the authors make several sharp
observations. First, the government’s status as
the ‘knowledge holder’ has been eroded by the
advent of the Internet, which has ‘produced a
mass disintermediation of the experts and the
institutions who used to hold the monopoly of
information’ (p. 28). Second, traditional civil
society has gradually weakened as the Internet
promotes ‘individually determined and centred
behaviours’ (p. 32). Third, perceived socioeco-
nomic transformation triggered by the Internet
revolution over the last three decades is yet to
materialise. As a consequence, with sluggish
economic progress, the stagnation of national
wealth creation has created new social divi-
sions and conflicts. All of the above points sug-
gest that liberal democracies need to be better
at adapting to these social mutations triggered
by technological advancement.
Their ultimate solution to the malaise of
mature democracy is more democracy that is
‘innovative in its institutional instruments and is
inclusive of knowledge holder participants in its
decisions’ (p. 76). To this end, the authors envis-
age a new form of democratic decision-making
involving several participatory channels for col-
lecting dispersed information/knowledge and
turning it into policy choices. Such a collective
decision-making mechanism incorporates tradi-
tional channels (i.e. elections and referenda) to
allow indirect citizen participation as elector-
ates, and, more importantly, creates new institu-
tionalised channels to directly engage citizens in
policy-making as innovators.
The underlying nature of the decreased per-
formance of the West is well reflected in a
U-curved relationship between democracy and
growth in an Internet-based society. This rela-
tionship is represented by three possibilities:
diluted democracies, centralised economies
and evolving democracies. The cases of Italy
as a diluted democracy and China as central-
ised economy are analysed in great detail. The
authors’ description of China resembles an
adaptive autocracy with democratic character-
istics, one that is capable of managing effective
decision-making through the method of cen-
tralisation with local experimentation. In con-
trast, the authors’ native Italy represents a case
of a sclerotic liberal democracy that is unable
to transform individual knowledge and prefer-
ences into informed policies. Similar empirical
attention is not given to the third possibility,
the ideal situation in the U-curve relationship,
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