Eur. Phys. J. B 39, 535-544 (2004)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2004-00227-5

Neighborhood models of minority opinion spreading

¹ Instituto Mediterráneo de Estudios Avanzados IMEDEA (CSIC-UIB), Campus UIB, 07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain
² Departamento de Física, Universitat de les Illes Balears, 07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain

Corresponding authors: ^a tessonec@imedea.uib.es - ^b raul@imedea.uib.es - ^c pau@imedea.uib.es - ^d wio@ifca.unican.es - ^e maxi@imedea.uib.es

Received: 13 March 2004
Published online: 23 July 2004

Abstract

We study the effect of finite size population in Galam's model [Eur. Phys. J. B 25, 403 (2002)] of minority opinion spreading and introduce neighborhood models that account for local spatial effects. For systems of different sizes N, the time to reach consensus is shown to scale as in the original version, while the evolution is much slower in the new neighborhood models. The threshold value of the initial concentration of minority supporters for the defeat of the initial majority, which is independent of N in Galam's model, goes to zero with growing system size in the neighborhood models. This is a consequence of the existence of a critical size for the growth of a local domain of minority supporters.