Academic papers are what get's published, not what's true. The difference is particularly pronounced for political topics.
Right, it's a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.
It's not a necessary condition. Academic papers are regularly mistaken either due to methodological limitations, bad statistical methodology, publication bias, stretching of conclusions and a host of other factors. The fact that information has been published is evidence that it contains true information, but is not even necessarily strong evidence. Keep in mind that in the field of cancer research, which is on much firmer quantitative footing than political science "research," researchers were unable to replicate 89% of studies.
So you're playing the credence game, and you’re getting a pretty good sense of which level of confidence to assign to your beliefs. Later, when you’re discussing politics, you wonder how you can calibrate your political beliefs as well (beliefs of the form "policy X will result in outcome Y"). Here there's no easy way to assess whether a belief is true or false, in contrast to the trivia questions in the credence game. Moreover, it’s very easy to become mindkilled by politics. What do you do?
In the credence game, you get direct feedback that allows you to learn about your internal proxies for credence, i.e., emotional and heuristic cues about how much to trust yourself. With political beliefs, however, there is no such feedback. One workaround would be to assign high confidence only to beliefs for which you have read n academic papers on the subject. For example, only assign 90% confidence if you've read ten academic papers.
To account for mindkilling, use a second criterion: assign high confidence only to beliefs for which you are ideologically Turing-capable (i.e., able to pass an ideological Turing test). As a proxy for an actual ideological Turing test, you should be able to accurately restate your opponent’s position, or be able to state the strongest counterargument to your position.
In sum, to calibrate your political beliefs, only assign high confidence to beliefs which satisfy extremely demanding epistemic standards.