 Those who defend instrumentalism take it as a premise that there is an ideal outcome that exists independently of the democratic process, and in terms of which the value of the democratic process, its legitimacy, can be gauged. The instrumentalist accounts of Richard Arneson (2003) and Steven Wall (2007), for example, refer to some ideal egalitarian distribution. In their view, the legitimacy of political institutions and the decisions made within them depends on how closely they approximate the ideal egalitarian distribution. If sacrificing political equality allows for a better approximation of equality overall, so their argument goes, then this does not undermine legitimacy.