Over the weekend, the Democratic Unity Reform Commission issued recommendations aimed at giving power back to the party’s “grass-roots.” The recommendations would cut back the number of so-called superdelegates by 60 percent, in an effort to loosen elite control over the presidential nomination process and make the party more democratic.

These recommendations illustrate the types of reforms we often see connected to democracy within parties. But these reforms are actually difficult to define and implement across many states. Part of the reason it’s difficult to make a party internally democratic is that this is the wrong way to think about parties.

The concept of democracy within a political party is tricky. As with many other institutions, parties have become more democratically run over time. Important decisions like nominations and platform stances used to be made by bosses and convention delegates; now they’re largely determined by rank-and-file voters in primaries and caucuses. The logic of running things more democratically is that people tend to have more faith in the resulting decisions — those choices are more legitimate.

Like just about any other institution, a party requires legitimacy to operate. It makes many decisions on behalf of its members and operates the complex caucuses, primaries, conventions and other machinery that boil down dozens of candidates into just one nominee. Similarly, it tries to weigh the many wide-ranging views of its members into a coherent platform. For it to do these things and still get roughly half the votes of the American electorate, people have to have some faith that its actions are done in good faith.