Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.
Independence of the judiciary from executive and legislative encroachment. Specifically captures court-packing, selective prosecution, judicial reshuffles.
Federal Police Operation Car Wash launched 17 Mar 2014 from Curitiba anti-money-laundering probe. Exposed systemic bribery between Petrobras executives, major construction firms (Odebrecht, OAS, Andrade Gutierrez, Camargo Corrêa) and political parties (PT, PMDB, PP). Over 2014-2020: ~280 convictions, BRL 4bn+ recovered, Odebrecht plea-bargains exposed cross-LatAm bribery. Key figures: Judge Sergio Moro, prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol. Later STF annulments 2021 (Lula convictions vacated on jurisdictional grounds). Reshaped Brazilian + Latin American political economy.
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.