Cognitive polyphasia

These couple of sentences leaped out of an article by Polly Toynbee recently:

It was pollster Ben Page who first used the phrase “cognitive polyphasia” to describe what pollsters find all the time: most people hold several entirely contradictory beliefs at once. They want local decision-making but are adamantly opposed to a postcode lottery….

Another example of this can be found in the demands for political consistency. Here, for example, a political party allows it’s need to advocate a consistent policy everywhere to trump it’s demands for localised policymaking. It’s a very good post that raises a number of variations on this question.

I was planning to draft a series of posts on ‘the causes of centralisation’ saying that in a much longer way, but I don’t think I need to now, do I? So…..

The causes of political centralisation:

No 1 – cognitive polyphasia. Where the public or political parties say that they want local decision-making, but then also want local decisions to always have the same outcomes – wherever they are taken.