Oliver Traldi is a John and Daria Barry Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He received a PhD in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame.

Part I: Preliminaries; 1. What is political?; 2. What are beliefs?; 3. What are political beliefs? What is politicization?; 4. Political conflict and interpreting political disagreement; 5. The politics of verbal disputes; Part II: Theories; 6. Theories of type and personality; 7. Theories of inertia and ideology; 8. Theories of identity, signaling, and partisanship; 9. Theories of positionality, standpoint, and experience; 10. Theories of tunneling and ideational determinism; 11. Minimalist and eliminativist theories; Part III: Sources; 12. Debunking and rationalizing political epistemology; 13. Skepticism from widespread disagreement; 14. Democracy; 15. Decentralization; 16. Expertise; 17. The ethics of belief; 18. The epistemology of liberalism; Part IV: Dynamics; 19. Polarization as sorting; 20. Polarization as extremism; 21. Conspiracy theories; 22. Propaganda, dehumanization, and gullibility; 23. News, narratives, and rumors; 24. Political epistemology and the philosophy of history; Conclusion.