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.
Iraq Reconstruction Special Measures Law passed 26 July 2003 authorising JSDF dispatch to Iraq for humanitarian and reconstruction activities in "non-combat zones." Ground Self- Defense Force deployed to Samawah, Muthanna Province (January 2004 - July 2006) — first postwar overseas deployment of Japanese ground forces to a conflict theatre without UN blue-helmet mandate. Air Self-Defense Force continued airlift support 2004- 2008. Law expired 31 July 2009 after five-year extension. Constitutional-doctrine stretch widely debated under Article 9.
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.