Abstract
This thesis deals with policy failure and policy success and aims at introducing this issue into the context of the Czech Republic. The main perspective of the thesis follows approaches to analysis of policy success and policy failure developed by Mark Bovens, Paul 't Hart, and Allan McConnell.
Their theoretical assumption is complex, as they evaluate the policies upon the criteria of the more general dimensions (process, program, and politics). The goal of the thesis is not only to utilize their theoretical background but also to refine and reconceptualize current theory of policy success and policy failure, respectively.
The thesis is based on case study research design. The chosen case - organizational reform of labor offices - is considered as a typical policy failure.
I describe and analyze in detail the selected case with a wide range of qualitative and quantitative methods. This reform was extensive and was realized in two stages.
The first stage focused on the organizational structure (from decentralized to centralized management). The second stage included changes in the content of the public employment services provided by the labor offices (the newly introduced services were all non-insurance social benefits).
The analysis of labor offices reform seeks to answer the following questions, 1) how the reform failed, 2) why it failed, and 3) what impact it had. The overall structure of the dissertation thesis therefore aims at generalizing, confirming and building the theory of policy failure and success.
Specific results from the case study are compared and confronted with the theory of policy failure and success in the final part. I believe that the thesis has both theoretical and practical relevance.
Theoretical uniqueness is related to the newly discovered dimension for evaluation of policy failure. I call it polity dimension.
As for practical implications, six broad recommendations for policy makers are formulated with the hope that it will help them better understand why policies fail and how they can be designed more successfully.