Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.
General government spending as share of GDP, excluding transfers already captured under fiscal.transfer_expansion to avoid double-counting.
German ratification of the Treaty establishing the European Stability Mechanism (signed Feb 2012, effective Sep 2012) creating a permanent €500bn intergovernmental lending facility replacing the temporary EFSF. Challenged at the Federal Constitutional Court; ruling of 12 September 2012 permitted ratification subject to conditions (German liability capped at €190bn, Bundestag information rights preserved). Enabled the Spanish banking-sector programme, Cypriot programme, and subsequently Third Greek Memorandum financing.
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.