The relationship between political freedom and economic growth has been a much scrutinized topic over the past few decades. Amongst the plethora of studies, one artide stands out: In his seminal article Democracy and Growth, Barro found that once the impact of other exogenous factors are controlled for, the effect of democracy on growth is weakly negative. He further raised the possibility of a nonlinear relationship between democracy and growth. Barro’s work, while convincing in terms of methodological rigor and interesting in terms of the observations made, nonetheless is hardly free from the flaws that may potentially undermine the credibility of his arguments. This is the point of departure for this artide. The first section of the artide discusses the potential flaws evident in Barro (1996), and suggests ways to improve upon his work. The second section introduces fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) as an alternative methodological approach, and analyzes the relationship between democracy and economic growth using fsQCA. The analysis generally concurs with the nonlinearity hypothesis suggested by Barro (1996): democracy does in fact disparately impact economic growth at different levels of democracy. For full democracies and authoritarian regimes, causal combinations indicate that democracy has a positive impact on economic growth. For flawed democracies and hybrid regimes with intermediate levels of democracy, the dynamic between democracy and economic growth is revealed to be negative.