Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.
Putin nominated Dmitry Medvedev as his presidential successor on 10 December 2007; Medvedev reciprocally announced Putin as his future PM. Medvedev won the March 2008 election with 70.3%; Putin became PM 8 May 2008. The 'tandem' arrangement held through 2011 when Putin announced return to the presidency for 2012.
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.