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.
Creation of the Digital Agency (デジタル庁 / Dejitaru-chō) as a cross-ministry central authority on 1 September 2021, established by the Digital Agency Establishment Act (Act No. 36 of 2021) signed in May 2021. Consolidates digital-government functions previously dispersed across ministries, with mandates covering My-Number Card integration, government cloud and common infrastructure procurement, ID-linked public services, and oversight of sectoral digitalisation. Headed by a minister reporting directly to the Cabinet, with a mixed staff of career bureaucrats and private-sector secondees. Motivated by the COVID-era exposure of paper-and-fax legacy government workflows and the botched COCOA contact-tracing app.
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.