Abstract
The article Welfare State Across Constitutions focuses on the tension between the requirement for stability and immutability of constitutions and the political nature of the welfare state, and tries to uncover the possible relationships between the constitutional entrenchment of social rights and the actual state of the welfare state. However, to uncover these relationships on a general scale is too ambitious a task to be realized in a work of this scope.
Therefore, the author's ambition is rather to partially reveal these relationships using examples from countries that are generally the most typical representatives of types of welfare states. It was necessary first to focus on the issue of the welfare state in isolation.
Despite some reservations, Esping-Andersen's 'three worlds' model of the welfare state from the 90s can be considered sufficiently representative even today. These ideal worlds are the social democratic state (most closely approached by the Scandinavian countries - the text mainly focuses on Sweden), the conservative (closest to Germany), and the liberal (closest to the USA).
After a brief pause at the possible theoretical relationships between constitutions and socio-economic rights, follows an analysis of the relationship between constitutions and the instruments of the welfare state in the three aforementioned countries. The main effort is to answer whether there is a link between the characteristic features of the welfare state of a given country and the constitutional entrenchment of socio-economic rights, and whether the constitution tends to strengthen or weaken these characteristics.
However, in this context, a simple conclusion cannot be drawn due to the fact that the answer varies depending on the enforcement mechanism of the constitution and the political situation.