Transposition Beyond Policy Legacies and Veto Players? The Case of Anti-Discrimination Policy in Austria

The transposition of European Union directives involves the reconciliation of domestic and European interests. More often than not, domestic politics overrule European requirements to comply in a timely and correct manner. This domestication of the transposition process has often been observed in states belonging to the “world of domestic politics”, one of the least researched country clusters in the “worlds of compliance” typology developed by Falkner et al. (2005). This paper provides additional empirical evidence on how domestic politics overrule European demands once a conflict between both levels occurs. This is done with the study of the transposition of two EU Anti-discrimination directives in Austria. There, transposition had to overcome two types of conflict. On the one hand, a policy legacy diametrically opposed to anti-discrimination; on the other hand, an actor constellation ideologically contrary to anti-discrimination law. Based on the empirical material presented here, the paper suggests a number of strategies on how to further extant theoretical contributions in the field of transposition studies