Tributes for the late American president Gerald Ford were barely over when news broke that distinguished political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset passed away on December 31 at the age of 84. He was a giant among political scientists for over the past half-century. But his towering stature was also well-known outside academia. The reason is obvious. Mr. Lipset knew the political culture of Canada and the United States like no other analyst. He knew what made a democracy work. And there were important lessons to be drawn here from his publications.

He once mentioned how awed he was "that a young man from New York City, who had literally not been more than a few miles west of the Hudson, could think of heading off to the Canadian prairies to study the political behaviour of wheat farmers."

But his book Agrarian Socialism gave more than a description of the politics of Saskatchewan. It also gave an understanding of why third parties emerge - and even form government - in Canada, while similar political movements in the States remain moribund.

In the case of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, for example, the party's success in winning a few constituencies in Saskatchewan provided them with a base to launch a serious bid to form government in future elections. But, south of the border, third parties like the federation were filtered out during the primary elections and absorbed into one of the country's mainline parties.

Therefore, the simple lesson for a new party such as the Greens is to accept and use our present electoral system to mount a strategy that could win them a respectable presence in a provincial legislature or the national parliament. It may be a more arduous route than the one offered by proportional representation. But a win under a first-past-the-post system is a win with lasting credibility, forcing the powers-that-be to pay attention to viable third parties rather than merely tolerating them.

And it's lessons like this that turn men into monuments.

Because, while tributes to statesmen may be embellished (such as United States vice-president Dick Cheney's claim that Mr. Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon concluded "the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War."), tributes to philosophers are far more honest.

And to say that Mr. Lipset's contributions to our understanding of American and Canadian politics are formidable may even be considered as an understatement.

Allan Warnke, a Malaspina University-College political science professor, served as the provincial Liberal MLA for Richmond-Steveston between 1991 and 1996.