Environmental regulation stringency — emissions caps, standards, phase-out mandates, carbon pricing, renewable portfolio standards.
Policy posture toward energy supply security — domestic production capacity, import diversification, strategic reserves, nuclear stance, fossil-fuel mix discipline.
General government spending as share of GDP, excluding transfers already captured under fiscal.transfer_expansion to avoid double-counting.
Trade policy openness — tariffs, non-tariff barriers, FTAs, industrial protection.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan's June-July 2010 pledge to raise the consumption tax from 5% to 10% by the mid-2010s reframed Japan's fiscal-consolidation debate ahead of the July upper-house election. The proposal, motivated by mounting public-debt and social-security financing pressures, was widely blamed for DPJ election losses but became the political seed for the 2012 Integrated Social Security and Tax Reform that legislated the increase.
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.