Size of cash and near-cash transfer programmes (unemployment benefits, means-tested assistance, universal child benefits). Architecturally distinct from forced-saving schemes — see condition welfare_architecture.
General government spending as share of GDP, excluding transfers already captured under fiscal.transfer_expansion to avoid double-counting.
Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.
Trade policy openness — tariffs, non-tariff barriers, FTAs, industrial protection.
The "Jigyou Shiwake" public budget screening process, run by the Hatoyama DPJ Government Revitalization Unit in November 2009, held televised hearings reviewing more than 200 budget items and recommending cuts, mergers and abolitions. The exercise was a high-profile attempt to break LDP-era budget rigidity, shift discretionary spending toward the DPJ manifesto priorities, and demonstrate fiscal scrutiny to the public.
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.