Dr Edwards used Twitter to announce his voluntary resignation after 10 years in the politics department.
"Sad to be saying goodbye to @otago — just signed my voluntary redundancy from Politics Dept. Finish in April, appreciative of 10 great years," his tweet read.
Job losses in the humanities division had made him question his future at the institution.
"There is the restructure going on in humanities and that just made me think about my role there and obviously we are going to go into these more difficult times and it has encouraged me, and I think all staff, to think about what our future is in the division ..."
In August, humanities pro-vice-chancellor Prof Tony Ballantyne announced plans to cut jobs in English and linguistics, anthropology and archaeology, history, music, and languages and cultures, because of sustained drops in the division’s roll since 2011.
It was a "misconception" other departments were not having to make changes, Dr Edwards said.
"We were all offered the opportunity to apply for voluntary redundancy and so that is what I did."
All departments within the division were having to make "big changes" and reduce spending.
He offered his redundancy before the university announced which departments faced cuts, he said.
No other staff in the department had made the same offer.
"Whether politics would have been on that list or not had I not gone redundant, I don’t know.
"I think every department is under a lot of pressure to attract more students and get more output produced than they have been and that is just the nature of the state of the budgets."
The New Zealand politics, public policy, political parties, elections and political communication lecturer and researcher said leaving the job was a hard decision, but he had no regrets.
On leaving the role in April he planned to move to Wellington to complete a book about problems in New Zealand democracy and take "a very active role" analysing the general election.
Cuts to the division, possibly totalling 20 people, were likely to take effect this month, Prof Ballantyne said.