The Paul Simon Public Policy Institute is located at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. It was founded by Paul Simon, a former two-term U.S. Senator from Illinois and one-time candidate for the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States. Opening in 1997, the Institute differentiates itself from similar organizations by working directly with elected officials and others to fashion and implement change in public policy.

The institute is bipartisan and sponsors many on-campus programs featuring state and local politicians, educators, entrepreneurs, and many others. Throughout the year, the institute hosts lectures and conferences around relevant topics featuring significant and controversial issues impacting the region, the state, the nation, and the world.

Located at SIUC, the Institute offers a variety of opportunities for students, including legislative internship programs and the Paul Simon Institute Ambassadors, which allows students to network and volunteer their time in assisting the Institute staff in outreach efforts to the campus and community.

The current director of the Institute is John T. Shaw, an author and journalist who for more than 20 years covered the United States Congress for Market News International, a global financial wire service. His published works include: JFK in the Senate: Pathway to the Presidency; Washington Diplomacy; The Ambassador: Inside the Life of a Working Diplomat; Richard G. Luger, Statesman of the Senate; and Rising Star, Setting Sun: Dwight D. Eisenhauer, John F. Kennedy, and the Presidential Transition that Changed America.

Previous directors include David Yepsen, who served from 2009 to 2016, and Mike Lawrence, who served as director from 2004 to 2008. Simon served as Institute director from 1997 to his death in 2003. Simon died in Springfield, Illinois following heart surgery at the age of 75 in 2003.

In March 2020, the Institute published "Restoring American Statesmanship: A Citizen's Guide," a resource for elected officials, businesses, schools, foundations, civic groups and policy institutes.^[2] The publication seeks to imagine what a rebirth of statesmanship will look like in Illinois and the United States during a pivotal time in American history.

The institute regularly hosts lectures and speaker series, including Pizza & Politics, which connects students and the community to political figures. Its Women's Government Day and Youth Government Day bring women and young people to the Illinois Capitol in Springfield. And its Metro East Youth Leadership Weekend brings young African American men from the Metro East St. Louis area to campus for leadership development and community service.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Institute launched the livestream discussion series "Understanding Our New World," "Illinois Authors," and "Meet the Mayor."

Government and private sector leaders, policy experts, historians, diplomats, philanthropists and military leaders have joined Institute Director John Shaw to discuss how our political, economic, and social changes are influencing our present and future. Notable guests have included former Irish President Mary Robinson, former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations Jan Eliasson, former U.S. presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, New America CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter, and U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth.

This speaker series provides a venue for book and author discussions focusing on Illinois history, politics, economics, sports, and culture. The series was launched as a virtual speaker series during the COVID-19 pandemic, but in-person events are expected to be held in 2022.

This virtual speaker series features conversations with mayors from around Illinois.

This Initiative is built around an annual summit of college students, historical case studies and commemorations, and over-the-horizon seminars by leading analysts on the future challenges confronting Illinois.

The Institute launched the Renewing Illinois Student Summit in the spring of 2019 with a summit of university students from across the state. The inaugural event's theme was "Ambitious Dreams and Practical Steps to Revive the Prairie State." In 2020, the theme was to be "One Illinois: Noble Aspiration or Impossible Dream?" The 2020 summit was reformatted due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Institute developed a booklet with letters from Illinois General Assembly leaders, a reflection of the time by one of the state's leading historians, and several travel essays that underscore the beauty and diversity of the state. While preparing for the 2020 summit, the Institute asked 25 prominent Illinoisans to respond to the question: "If you were teaching an 'Illinois 101' course to highly motivated undergraduates, what five books would you assign them to read?" The result is the Institute's "Illinois 101 Recommended Reading List" containing essential reading about Illinois history and politics.

The Institute in 2021 launched the Future of Illinois Project, which will convene demographers, historians, political scientists, social activists, futurists, and business leaders to peer out over the horizon and assess the fundamental challenges facing Illinois.

On Nov. 16, 2020, former Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar and Paul Simon Public Policy Institute Director John Shaw announced a new annual award that celebrates exceptional leadership in Illinois.^[3] The award recognizes leaders who display vision, courage, compassion, civility, effectiveness and bipartisanship in their work. The award will be announced at the August meeting of the Edgar Fellows Program.

The inaugural award in 2021 recognized 11 Republican members of the Illinois General Assembly who supported a critical budget package in July 2017 to end the Illinois budget impasse. The GOP lawmakers joined with Democrats to override then-Governor Bruce Rauner's veto of a budget compromise. This vote ended the two-year fiscal stalemate that tarnished Illinois' reputation, damaged schools, battered the state's credit rating, and led to about $15 billion in unpaid bills. The budget that emerged allowed Illinois to avoid further downgrading of its debt and ensured that state government would resume regular operations.

The Simon Review is a series of research papers that explore public policy issues, especially in Illinois. In 2021, Steve Brown, press secretary for longtime Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, wrote an exit essay detailing his time working in legislative communications in the statehouse.^[4] Professors John Jackson and John Foster also updated their research on the Illinois public budgeting process, finding that despite political messaging, downstate Illinois receives more from public coffers than it contributes in tax dollars.^[5]

Paul Simon lived for many years in the small town of Makanda, south of Carbondale, where he was a professor and director of the SIU Public Policy Institute. There, he worked to foster the Institute into becoming a thinktank that could advance the lives of all people. Activities included going to Liberia and Croatia to monitor their elections, bringing major speakers to campus, denouncing the death penalty, trying to end the United States embargo against Cuba,^[6] fostering political courage among his students, and promoting amendments to the Constitution to end the Electoral College and to limit the president to a single six-year term of office. Concerning the Electoral College during the controversial Election 2000 fiasco, Simon said, "I think if somebody gets the majority vote, they should be president. But, I don't think the system is going to be changed."

Simon believed modern presidents practice "followship" rather than leadership: "We have been more and more leaning on polls to decide what we're going to do, and you don't get leadership from polls... and not just at the presidential level. It's happening with senators, House members and even state legislators sometimes [when they] conduct polls to find out where people stand on something."^[7]

• Paul Simon Public Policy Institute