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.
Merkel-Schäuble insistence on strict conditionality (austerity + structural reform) attached to successive Greek, Irish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Cypriot bailout programmes via the EFSF (2010) and its permanent successor the European Stability Mechanism (ESM, Bundestag approval 27 September 2012). Reinforced by the Fiscal Compact (TSCG, 2012). Coded as the defining Merkel-Schäuble external economic posture — ordoliberal rule-binding projected at Eurozone scale — that ECB policy (OMT, Draghi 'whatever it takes' July 2012) ultimately had to offset.
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.