Neighborhood models of minority opinion spreading

We introduce neighborhood models that account for local spatial effects in Galam's model [1] of minority opinion spreading. This model describes the spread of a minority opinion, incorporating absic mechanisms of social inertia, resulting in democratic rejection of social reforms initially favored by a majority. For systems with a number of agents N, the time to reach consensus is shown to scale with log(N) in Galam's model, while it grows linearly with N 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 number of agents in the neighborhood models. We show that this is a consequence of the existence of a critical size for the growth of a local domain of majority supporters