I think there's a certain amount of truth in the article Wolfgang posted. I've encountered something similar in the way people have voted in an internet forum I administer. We've set it up as a democratic system in which all major decisions and many minor decisions are made by a consensus vote.

When we first set up our system, a lot of people (mostly men) wanted strong rules, strictly enforced. A lot of them wanted the admin and moderators to be able to ban people. A lot of them wanted corrective action, including banning, to be administered after a very small number of infractions. We ended up with a compromise system in which other corrective action (deletion of posts, for instance) would take place before stronger corrective action would kick in, which would be in the form of post limits rather than banning.

The interesting thing is that, after these rules were voted in, when it came time to actually enforce them, the very same people who were the most vocal about wanting the most strenuous rules and the most strenuous enforcement of rules before the vote were the ones who were the most vocal about not wanting them to be enforced in any way after the rules were put in place. And they didn't just not want the rules to apply to them, they didn't want them to apply to others, either. It was very strange. The way I found this out was by testing the waters the first time a couple of members got into a heated argument with a lot of personal attacks. I deleted a few posts to see how committed they were to what they had voted on. Pretty much all of the ones who had voted for strict rules were upset about the deletions.

My theory is that a lot of people, especially in the US, and especially men, have very compartmentalized thought processes. They have one concept of what they think they think, but what they really think is something very different.