Neighborhood models of minority opinion spreading

TL;DR

This paper extends Galam's minority opinion spreading model by incorporating local neighborhood effects, revealing slower consensus dynamics and size-dependent thresholds for minority dominance.

Contribution

Introduces neighborhood models that include local spatial effects, contrasting with Galam's original global interaction model, and analyzes their impact on opinion spreading dynamics.

Findings

Consensus time scales as ln N in original model

Neighborhood models exhibit slower evolution

Threshold for minority success decreases with system size

Abstract

We study the effect of finite size population in Galam's model [Eur. Phys. J. B 25 (2002) 403] 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 ln N 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.