Informational Subsidies in Rising Powers: An Empirical Text-as-Data Analysis of the Civil BRICS Council

Policy makers operate under severe informational and capacity constraints, particularly in complex, multi-issue environments where agenda setting itself constitutes a critical stage of the policy process. This paper studies whether structured civil-society input can shape high-level agenda attention through an informational channel. We focus on the Civil BRICS Council, a consultative body that has existed for more than a decade within the BRICS framework but underwent a qualitative institutional transformation in 2024, when it was formally elevated and began producing a structured policy brief directed at heads of state. We construct a new corpus of official BRICS Leaders’ Declarations from 2009 to 2025 and the Civil BRICS Council’s 2024 policy brief. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, we map these texts into a panel of latent policy topics and measure agenda attention as topic prevalence. Our identification strategy exploits the 2024 institutionalization of the Council as a plausibly exogenous timing shock and implements a Difference-in-Differences design with continuous treatment intensity defined by the Council’s emphasis across topics. Rather than identifying a stable average treatment effect, the analysis shows that agenda uptake is highly conditional on semantic aggregation and institutional legibility. Evidence of alignment between civil society and leaders’ discourse emerges only at intermediate levels of topic aggregation, while both coarse and highly granular specifications fail to produce consistent effects. These findings suggest that informational subsidies do not translate mechanically into political attention, but depend on how issues are cognitively packaged and processed within institutions. JEL Codes: F53, F55, D78