Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.
12th Malaysian general election held 8 March 2008. BN retained federal government with 140/222 seats and ~50.3% popular vote but lost two-thirds supermajority for first time since 1969 (had held >2/3 since 1973). Opposition Pakatan Rakyat (PKR + DAP + PAS) won 82 seats and 5 state governments — Penang, Kedah, Perak, Selangor, Kelantan (PAS). Anwar Ibrahim, released from prison September 2004, not yet returned to Parliament but effective campaign leader. UMNO internal pressure forced PM Abdullah Badawi to announce April 2008 that he would hand over to Najib Razak in 2010 (ultimately April 2009). Recalibrated Malaysian electoral politics — first credible federal-level opposition challenge.
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.