Diaspora perceptions of overseas citizen voting implementation in The Gambia : a descriptive study, with Cabo Verde as an illustrative reference point

Abstract

This thesis is, at its core, a descriptive study. It asks a modest question: what do the diasporas surveyed here perceive about Overseas Citizen Voting implementation in The Gambia? Forty-four Gambian and five Cabo Verdean respondents were surveyed. The data support that among respondents, clear and statistically identifiable patterns emerge, worth taking seriously. The analysis is anchored on citizenship-as-participation theory, rooted in Aristotle, procedural justice theory (Lind and Tyler, 1988; Norris, 2014), linking institutional design to how citizens feel about it, and the civic republican tradition of T.H. Marshall (1950). The Gambia is the primary case: a relatively small, post-colonial West African country with a large, economically significant diaspora and constitutional Overseas Citizen Voting (OCV) provisions held since 1997 that have not been operationalised for its diaspora. Cabo Verde, which shares background features with The Gambia but constructed a functional OCV a few years after its transition, is incorporated here as a small, illustrative reference, not a second case study. Data were collected through a perception survey administered between January and April 2026: 44 completed responses from The Gambia and five from Cabo Verde. These five are not a sample in any statistical sense; they are read case by case, as illustrative evidence, not a population estimate or claim of comparability. The instrument measured four constructs: democratic inclusion and recognition, institutional legitimacy and trust, political voice and agency, and engagement beyond the ballot box. Three things stand out with a consistency hard to manufacture. Respondents feel financially valued and politically disregarded at the same time: 77.3% agreed that home-country officials in fact prioritise their remittances over their political rights, while 54.5% disagreed that their government treats them as full members of the political community. Institutional trust sits below the midpoint on almost every item touching the electoral commission or the fairness of results. Political engagement has not died out in the absence of a vote; it has moved into social media and diaspora advocacy networks, while 79.5% of respondents said they would vote from abroad if a realistic system existed. On most shared items, the Cabo Verdean responses, despite their very small number, described a more favourable institutional experience than the Gambian sample, consistent with their country's much longer operational history, though this remains descriptive contrast, not evidence of comparability. Beyond this descriptive core, the thesis offers a modest interpretive layer tied to the findings, not a methodology. It suggests that the three-stage model of OCV implementation by Palop-Garcia and Pedroza (2019) carries a perceptual dimension the model was not built to capture, and that procedural justice theory offers a plausible, though not causally demonstrated, account of why institutional trust and institutional presence travel together in this data. These are offered as propositions for a larger study to test, not as findings this study is positioned to prove.