Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.
The Law of 1 July 1901 established a general legal framework for private associations in France, allowing most non-profit groups to form freely upon declaration while subjecting religious congregations to separate state authorisation. In the political economy of the early Third Republic it was a foundational republican state-building measure: voluntary organisations, educational leagues, mutual-aid circles, and civic associations gained predictable legal personality inside a more secular and uniform public-law order.
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.