SUMMARYIt has often been maintained that political democracy has a negative impact on economic growth, particularly in less developed countries. Here, cross‐national regressions of two different growth variables on political democracy and on control variables, based on about 90 nations, are reported for the 1960 to 1979 period. Control variables include GNPper capita, gross domestic investment, school enrollment ratios, and sometimes the military participation ratio. While first results seem to support the notion of a negative growth effect of democracy, closer scrutiny reveals that this effect is no longer significant once the analysis is restricted to (more than 70) LDCs only. While a fairly strong and negative impact of democracy on growth can be demonstrated for nations where government revenue exceeds 20|X% of GDP, elsewhere there is no effect at all. It is not democracy itself that hurts the growth prospects of nations, but the combination of democracy and strong state interference with the econom