Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.
Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey conducted September-November 2017 by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (79.5% response, 61.6% Yes), followed by the Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act 2017 amending the Marriage Act 1961 to recognise same-sex marriage. A free vote was allowed in both houses. Unusual institutional pathway — a non-binding plebiscite-by-survey preceding a parliamentary vote — chosen as intra-Coalition compromise.
Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.
Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".
Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.