Resilience of science after austerity

In 2009, many governments implemented austerity measures. This often resulted in restrictions on science funding, increasing competition for funds. Here, we study the allocation of funding across universities by using a competitiveness measure from complexity science based on the bipartite network of universities and scientific subjects. Drawing on a comprehensive data set of 43,430 UK-funded grants between 2006 and 2020, a period covering the onset and relaxation of austerity, we provide two main results. First, we find that the effect of austerity on university grant income depended on research competitiveness: highly competitive universities increased grant income under austerity, while low-ranked universities lost income. Then, we study the resilience of science to austerity exploiting the natural experiment arising from the 2015 UK general election, when austerity was relaxed unexpectedly. We discover that the resilience of researchers at less competitive universities was surprisingly high. The number and size of grant applications grew more after 2015 at less competitive universities, increasing their grant income. Overall, results show that our network-based measure is a better proxy for research competitiveness than aggregate grant income across scientific subjects.