More important for a book on the theories of public policy,Derthick, and especially Pressman and Wildavsky hinted that a systematic understanding of cause and effect in implementation might be possible.This suggested that general frameworks of implementation could be constructed, and a more valuable contribution of the policy sciences to successful democratic policy making would be hard to imagine. A general theory of implementation could help avoid repeats of the Oakland and new towns policy failures by laying out detailed steps for executing a particular policy or program,making democratic policy making more effective. This was just the sort of contribution the Lasswellian ideal envisioned for the field of policy studies.By the end of the 1970s the race was on to construct a general framework of implementation, a systematic understanding of how policies worked.