Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.
Independence of the judiciary from executive and legislative encroachment. Specifically captures court-packing, selective prosecution, judicial reshuffles.
Killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a 15-member team linked to the Saudi state. US ODNI (2021) assessed Crown Prince MBS approved the operation. Eight defendants convicted in Saudi courts in closed-door proceedings; no senior officials held accountable. Triggered short-term foreign-capital hesitation (FII 2018 boycotts), US Congressional JASTA/arms-sale friction, and UK/Germany arms-export pauses — most reversed by 2022 under energy-price pressure.
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.