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.
11 Dec 2006 Operativo Conjunto Michoacán deployed ~4,000 SEDENA + federal police to Michoacán — first major domestic-military counter-narcotics operation. Strategy expanded to Tijuana, Chihuahua, Guerrero, Sinaloa 2007-2010. Kingpin-targeting generated cartel fragmentation (Los Zetas, CJNG splinters). Homicide rate rose from ~8/100k (2007) to ~23/100k (2011). Merida Initiative Jun 2008 added US counter-narcotics assistance ~USD 1.6bn. Human-rights complaints to CNDH rose sharply.
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.