Do Masks on Law Enforcement Affect an Individual's Democratic Satisfaction?

Democratic stability relies heavily on the public’s perception of institutional transparency and the belief that state actors are held accountable for their actions. While prior research has extensively examined how the militarization of local policing impacts state legitimacy, there is a gap in understanding how specific visual cues within federal immigration enforcement, namely the practice of officer masking, impact broader social evaluations of democratic quality. Using a symbolic-interactionalist framework, this research investigates whether the visual representation of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents serve as a symbolic signal of institutional secrecy, consequently eroding public satisfaction with democracy. This study uses a randomized survey experiment using AI-generated stimuli to isolate the effect of masking. All survey data is collected virtually through a Qualtrics survey that will be distributed via social media platforms Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat. Participants are randomly assigned to one of three groups: viewing an ICE arrest scenario featuring masked agents, the same scenario without masks, or a control group with no image but a question about their voting activity in the last general election. Following the treatment, participants rate their overall satisfaction with democracy and the perceived importance of living in a democratic system on a 1-10 scale. Data is then analyzed using Excel and JASP, utilizing an ANOVA to compare groups. We hypothesize that the presence of masks will trigger perceptions of reduced institutional accountability, leading to a statistically significant decrease in democratic satisfaction. These findings would suggest that seemingly minor visual choices in enforcement tactics can have profound consequences for the perceived health and legitimacy of US democratic governance.