The main purpose of this paper is to confront the social perception concerning the FTA with the so-called “expert knowledge”. Defining a mismatch between the social perception and the expert knowledge may contribute to better understanding of the controversies on the FTA, as well as to properly defining possible sources of social conflicts and vulnerabilities of the policy implementation level. Having examined relevant studies on the social expectations in Europe concerning FTA (for example Bertelsmann Foundation, 2016; Eurobarometer 2015, 2014) we have observed that the analysis should be developed and continued in more detail, including country-specific and time-variant dimensions. The European perception should be contrasted with the American one, however devoting special attention to opinions of the Latin Americans that constitute a significant population in the U.S. and are major contributors and beneficiaries of the NAFTA.
We test the following hypotheses:
There is a mismatch between social perception and expert knowledge on the FTA.
The mismatch is mainly based on emotional rather than a rational basis (on social sentiments).
We use content analysis as well as Bayesian Model Averaging, which allows estimation of how far from objective judgment an opinion of an average user of the internet is in Europe, U.S., and Latin America.