Norway’s Democracy provides a multi-angled perspective on one of the democratic world’s least explored pioneers, positing democratic development as a crucial entry point for understanding modern Norwegian history while robustly underscoring the country’s vanguard role in the modern Nordic and wider developmental narratives. It emphasizes the overlooked structural sides of Norway’s democratic story: its rule-based norms and practices, its unicameral, fixed-term parliament, and its array of non-elective institutions, all rooted in a survivalist yet mutable, Napoleonic-era constitution. Ross convincingly demonstrates the importance of structures and ground-rules as essential determinants of political behavior and wellsprings of democratic excellence, while forthrightly challenging traditional interpretations of Norway as a passive, late-coming polity. His insistent questioning and imaginative insights inform a strikingly original perspective on an old, established and surreptitiously impactful system, here posed as the first democratic globalist. Via this upward-looking democratic tour d’horizon, Norway’s uneven, contingency-based evolutionary path offers a suggestive template for democratic development in historically and geographically noncontiguous societies. At a time when the integrity of democratic performance is under pressure everywhere, its example and lessons lend crucial substance to the repurposing many believe to be vital for democracy’s future.