  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.
