ABSTRACT
We are accustomed to considering political participation as occurring within the boundaries of each nation-state, but within the last generation political participation across national borders has increased considerably. If, for the moment, we focus on the United States and participation stretching beyond its boundaries, we can remember the tremendous growth of social movements and their associated interest groups in the period from 1968 to 1974. Often using logos containing the planet Earth as a symbol, during this period groups such as the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation focused preeminently on the American domestic environment and lobbying the federal government. However, as the environment, by definition, includes the entire planet, the interests and focus on the American environmental movement continually moved outward beyond national borders to encompass concerns for the fate of the rainforests and then the overarching issue of global warming. The number of transnational environmental groups thus increased from ten in 1973 to ninety in 1993 as reported in The Yearbook of International Organizations (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 11). This includes the emergence of Greenpeace, almost a brand name, the World Wildlife Federation, and various groups with references to the oceans or rainforests in their names. Founded in London in 1961, the transnational human rights group Amnesty International grew rapidly during the 1960s and now claims 2.8 million members worldwide (250,000 in the United States) with offices in eighty countries; it might itself be considered a brand name (see https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/about" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">www.greenpeace.org/usa/about). The Yearbook of International Organizations listed 38 international human rights organizations in 1963, which had grown to 168 by 1993 (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 11). More recently, the group Transparency International was founded in Berlin in 1995 to combat political corruption worldwide and almost immediately became a force through its compilation and distribution of corruption ratings for all the governments of the world.
