Size of cash and near-cash transfer programmes (unemployment benefits, means-tested assistance, universal child benefits). Architecturally distinct from forced-saving schemes — see condition welfare_architecture.
General government spending as share of GDP, excluding transfers already captured under fiscal.transfer_expansion to avoid double-counting.
The Old Age Pensions Act introduced a non-contributory means-tested state pension for poorer elderly people over age 70, financed from general taxation. Though the benefit was small and eligibility restricted, the act marked a decisive break with the Poor Law approach by creating a national cash entitlement for old-age poverty outside the workhouse system and establishing the principle that old-age income security could be a routine function of the central state.
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.