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Wicksell's definition of political failure embodies an important distributional judgement which outlaws any pure redistribution of resources around point A except in so far as this is justified on citizens' underlying preferences for redistribution. A government can intervene efficiently in the welfare economic sense and yet still create a political failure. Moreover, the scope for political failure on this definition is vast, depending on the status quo point x0 being posited
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Political failure may also occur because of coordination difficulties among voters. Consider a world where there are both competent and incompetent candidates the latter defined as candidates who (for fixed ideological preferences) can generate a potential Pareto improvement. Then, it is possible to construct a political equilibrium between two incompetent and one competent candidate of different ideologies where voters fail to coordinate on the competent candidate who therefore loses (Besley and Coate (1997).