Over the weekend, a working group created by Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair Tom Perez and former Democratic primary opponents Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, tasked with examining the party’s use of unbound or so-called ‘superdelegates,’ began unveiling their recommendations for how the national party should structure itself in the years ahead.

If you recall, ‘superdelegates’ are elected Democratic officials as well as state and national party leaders who are given automatic seats at the nominating process of the Democratic National Convention and are free to throw their support to the candidate of their choosing.

The group’s recommendations, already endorsed by Perez and deputy chair Keith Ellison, would cut the current number of these unbound delegates (who in 2016 comprised roughly 15 percent of the total delegates at the convention ) by about 60 percent, while additionally binding many of the remaining superdelegates during the first round of voting to support the candidate that won that delegate’s state. If ratified, this move would be a significant symbolic reform for national Democrats, who since the contentious 2016 primary season have been grappling with questions of structural transparency, fairness, and inclusion.

The commission is also recommending a slew of less sexy but arguably more substantive structural reforms to the DNC itself that would include a significantly more transparent budgeting process and more restraints on potential conflicts of interest among the party’s membership.

While these proposed reforms must be approved by the 400 or so members of the DNC at their next meeting in late 2018 in order to go into effect, the fact that they are being openly debated at all is surprising when one considers how structurally insulated the DNC is from reformers on the ground. Even many party insiders have trouble describing the precise relationship that the DNC has with state party organizations, and that inscrutability can lend itself to inaccessibility.

As it stands, for your average Maine Democrat, the DNC is representative government thrice-removed: In March of even years, Democrats attend town caucuses that elect delegates to the Democratic State Convention in June; those state convention delegates elect representatives to the Maine Democratic party’s governing body, the Democratic State Committee, which in turn elects the state party’s chair and vice chair at an election several months later, who then sit on the DNC as our representatives. The state convention also directly elects two additional state representatives to the DNC during the course of the convention. Finally, all of these state chairs, vice chairs, and DNC representatives from across the country (as well as representatives from affiliated organizations like the Young Democrats of America) come together to elect the chair and the officers of the DNC.

Did you catch all of that?

These institutions have grown and slowly evolved over centuries of American history, and were born in an era when direct representation was less common, but the result today is a paradox of democracy. The process is so widely diffused and fragmented that it’s virtually impossible for the national party to control the process at the bottom–making the barrier to entry into the system sometimes as low as showing up to your town’s March caucus–but making the path to the top so circuitous that those who make it through the other side are often accountable to few others than themselves.

The fact, then, that change–even small and incomplete change–is on the cusp of occurring within the DNC is a clear indication that there is a movement on the ground that is broad-based and determined enough to engage in a campaign of reform, even on these arcane terms. As more and more people begin to understand that reforming our political systems is a necessary (though not sufficient) factor in realizing enduring progressive change in government, this movement will have nowhere to go but up.

The preceding originally appeared on mainebeacon.com, a website and podcast created by progressive group the Maine People’s Alliance.