Brigid: This is The Takeaway. I'm Brigid Bergin in for Melissa Harris-Perry.

Prime Minister Ardern: I know what this job takes and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It's that simple.

Brigid: In January, new Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced she's stepping down in leaving office no later than February 7th.

Prime Minister Ardern: After going on six years of some big challenges, I am human. Politicians are human. We give all that we can for as long as we can and then it's time.

Brigid: Ardern was the country's third woman Prime Minister. When she was elected at age 37, she was the youngest woman in the world to be the head of government. During her nearly five and a half years leading a nation of 5 million, she earned global celebrity and was hailed as an empathetic leader despite facing multiple unprecedented national crises.

Curtin: The reasoning, after she announced it, most people understood, but on that Thursday at 1:30 in the afternoon New Zealand time, the whole country took quite a large gasp. My name is Jennifer Curtin. I'm a Professor of Politics and Public Policy and the Director of the Public Policy Institute at the University of Auckland.

Brigid: Professor Curtin told Melissa Harris-Perry that from the start, Ardern defied expectations.

Curtin: She was hoisted into the labor leadership just six weeks out from our 2017 general election and that in itself was massively unexpected, and nobody really expected her to win enough of the vote to be able to form a government. Indeed, her party came second. For the next six weeks, there were a lot of coalition bargaining and she was the one that was able to come from second place and put together quite an unusual coalition for New Zealand politics with a conservative right small party and the Progressive Greens.

While that hamstrung her policy agenda, it did put labor into government at a time where probably with hindsight was the best thing for New Zealand, given the arrival of COVID, but in between, she gave birth to a little girl. She went to the UN rhetorically, took on Donald Trump in a way by talking up multilateralism and intolerance and kindness and compassion. She was the leader when we experienced really terrible terrorist attack on a mosque in Christchurch. Then we had a volcanic eruption, which also killed many people. This was all before COVID.

Then of course, COVID comes and she calmly takes the reins, closes the borders, she locks us in our homes, but she does it in a way that reassures us that this is what's going to work until the vaccine arrives. Her five and a half years of being Prime Minister, she's had to grapple with a lot more really devastating events than probably any leader since World War II.

Melissa: That language of she locked us in our homes, but with a certain kind of compassion. Talk to me a little bit about how exactly it is that she navigated that.

Curtin: Until the vaccine arrived, it was recognized that in order to protect our vulnerable communities, we all needed to be open to what internationally was seen as quite hard-lined draconian measures but the way she did it is that every day, she fronted a press conference at one o'clock, but she also speaks to people through Facebook Live. She communicated in language. Every day, people understood, talked about us living in bubbles, and just taking care of ourselves.

Because she had campaigned using an inclusive populist language, we all need to look after each other, about compassion and kindness being important in politics because she'd campaigned on that and then acted on it in advance of COVID. People saw it as authentic and reassuring, I think.

Dr. Melissa: Part of what happens during Ardern's tenure is you see a considerable increase in the number of women in the Labor Party. I'm wondering if that persists beyond her.

Curtin: The increase in the number of women in the Labor Party and in Parliament more generally preceded Ardern and enabled her to not necessarily be unusual when she won the leadership of the Labor Party, but there was something else that she had a star power, if you like, and I think in terms of charisma and the future of women in politics in New Zealand, it's going to be at least in Italy, a double-edged sword because there are a lot of young women.

She's inspired people of all genders who feel that she was able to represent them and represent what they cared about in ways that haven't been represented before, but by the same token, what we are really seeing now is research that shows, she was subjected to a lot of online hate, misogyny, other security threats to her family. People are still researching this, but it looks rather ominous for young women who want to get into politics.

Melissa: Given what you're saying, do you take her at her word about the reasons she's stepping back?

Curtin: I do actually. I think there's a sense that her tenure as Prime Minister has really been full of events that you don't expect to have to deal with in such succession. She hasn't had time to completely round out all the very big-picture policy opportunities. She's done a great service to the Labor Party. She held them together with significant unity and she's handed over the leadership to Chris Hipkins, who still has nine months to get his feet under the table and demonstrate that he can pick up the reins.

He's already at 23% preferred Prime Minister, which is higher than the opposition. She will be knowing that she did the right thing.

Melissa: When you talk about this willingness to pass over the reins, to not have to clinging on, do you think that may be a feature of women's political leadership in some way?

Curtin: From what we know about the study of women in political leadership is, especially during COVID, the ones that have led well are those that don't do that great, man, I'm in charge, I'm the authority on everything kind of model. They recognize that they don't know everything. The other thing is that whether or not we think an ethics of care is more likely to be something attached to women leaders, I suppose that also needs more evidence, but in Ardern's case, she privileged care of her citizens over economics growth in those kinds of more disembodied type approaches to keeping a country going.

Putting families first, putting health first, putting people first was a really significant initiative that she took compared to many other countries.

Brigid: Now, don't step away. We've got more lessons from New Zealand in just a moment. It's The Takeaway. I'm Brigid Bergin in for Melissa Harris-Perry. We're continuing Melissa's conversation with Professor Jennifer Curtin talking about New Zealand's outgoing Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. During Arden's second term, women in New Zealand's parliament earned enough seats to outnumber men for the first time, given that the country was the first to grant women the right to vote. Professor Curtin says it was a long time coming.

Curtin: Yes, we got the vote in 1893 and it was for all women of all colors. In that sense, we were pioneers. We didn't give women the right to stand for parliament. However, until 1919 and many of the women who'd argued for the franchise realized that they'd made an error in thinking that they could leave the representation of women's interests to men. Women's representation was very patchy until the 1970s.

When the women's movement here permeated the Labor Party in particular and women within the Labor Party who were probably more social democratic feminists, they picketed their own party conference because the men in charge of the party at the time were always relegating women's issues to the last day, the last session of the conference on the last day, and people were leaving. They did a lot of this work quite openly.

The party was reformed to allow better representation within the party, but again, it's stalls. At that point, we end up with proportional representation. There's an additional push for more diverse representation in all the parties and labor starts putting in what we call a soft quota, where when they're putting their party lists together, they take a bit of a pause and check what percentage of women rainbow communities, Māori, Pacific are part of that list.

That process, which has come to be more formalized as a quota in the last few years, has really helped labor to increase the percentage of candidates that it has who are women. We know that the Green Party, for example, is already around 70% women in its caucus. When labor wins government and the greens are in the parliament as well, that's essentially what pushes the representation of women up to 50%.

Melissa: Are there lessons from Ardern's tenure from the ways that she came to power, the ways that she used power, and the ways that she is now sitting power. Are there political lessons there?

Curtin: We really have to remember that while traditional political science tells us that politics is all about rationality. We saw with Arden that emotion and politics is also important and that while radical right populism has appealed to emotions that a divisive and often involve hate, there are opportunities for political leaders to flip that capacity for emotion on its head and encourage people to feel compassion towards their fellow citizens. She demonstrated that throughout her tenure.

The second thing, she's demonstrated a different kind of leadership to what we are used to here in New Zealand, where politics is still very much, even though we have a proportional system with several small parties. It's still two-party dominant. That lends itself to an adversarial style of politics that is often mean, personalized, and attack, and the media thrives on that. Ardern restrained herself considerably compared to other leaders we've had. She worked very well at consensus politics.

One of her lessons is that you can come to power, you can be in power, and you can leave power in a way that isn't always using negative rhetoric, isn't always adversarial, but can be inclusive.

Melissa: Jennifer Curtin is a Professor of Politics and Public Policy and the Director of the Public Policy Institute at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Thank you so much for joining us.

Curtin: Thank you very much.

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