Policy. Persuasion. Leadership.

Josh Bandoch works at the nexus of rigorous public policy research and cutting edge persuasive advocacy. Above all, he’s committed to empowering individuals and communities to unleash their potential.

As Head of Policy at the Illinois Policy Institute, he leads a team of researchers focusing on ensuring everyone is in a position to thrive. They investigate how to establish high-quality education, promote economic growth, and promote housing affordability, as well as ways to remove barriers to thriving like burdensome regulations.

Josh researches how to make the American Dream become reality for more of our neighbors. Central to that Dream is social mobility; and antithetical to it is poverty. We have too much of the latter, and not enough of the former. Josh is committed to turning that around.

Josh is widely recognized as a persuasion expert. His book How to Get What You Want: Mastering the Art and Science of Persuasion, is forthcoming in April 2026 and is distributed by Simon and Schuster. Josh has spent over a decade uncovering the secrets of persuasion. He’s mined psychology, neuroscience, economics, public policy, and history for cutting-edge techniques that work. He’s put them to use in hundreds of speeches written for senior government officials delivered to just about any audience. Josh uses and refines these persuasion techniques on a daily basis as a think tank leader, where he crafts and communicates policies on issues like poverty, social mobility, education, and the economy to politically diverse audiences, including elected officials, local and national media, and grassroots activists.