Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.
Congreso Nacional voted 44-34 on 6 February 1997 to declare Bucaram mentally incapacitated under Article 100 of the 1979 Constitution, invoked without psychiatric evaluation or due- process hearing. Constitutional crisis with three simultaneous claimants to the presidency: Bucaram (disputing removal), Vice-President Rosalía Arteaga, and Congressional President Fabián Alarcón. Military intervention 9 February backed Alarcón as interim president until 10 August 1998. Bucaram fled to Panama. Set precedent reused against Mahuad (2000) and Gutiérrez (2005).
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.