After leaving frontbench politics, Dugdale worked as a columnist and appeared as a contestant on the seventeenth series of ITV reality show I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!

She later resigned her seat and Scottish Labour membership in July 2019 and accepted the role of director of the John Smith Centre for Public Service at the University of Glasgow.

[1] Dugdale sat on Scottish Labour's Policy Forum from 2006 until 2008, as well as serving as an election agent to both Sarah Boyack MSP and Sheila Gilmore MP.

She served as a Scottish Labour and Co-operative Party member and sat on the Local Government and Regeneration and Subordinate Legislation Committees.

[8] Dugdale won the 2014 Scottish Labour deputy leadership election, succeeding Anas Sarwar, and defeating Katy Clark.

[12] In a July 2015 televised leadership debate, she said it was wrong the vast majority of the 232 Labour MPs abstained on the Conservative government's Welfare Reform and Work Bill in a second reading vote in the House of Commons.

[11] During an August 2015 interview with The Guardian, Dugdale refused to publicly say who out of the four candidates in the UK Labour Party leadership election she supported, but did express serious doubts as to whether Jeremy Corbyn could ever become Prime Minister.

She focused her campaign on a proposal to increase income tax to tackle underfunding of services by the Scottish National Party government, particularly in education.

Dugdale was once again returned as an additional member for the Lothian region, having failed to win the Edinburgh Eastern constituency from the SNP by 5,087 votes.

[20] On 22 August, she declared her support for Owen Smith in the 2016 Labour Party leadership election but also said her position would remain tenable were Corbyn to win re-election.

Speaking about the experience afterwards, she said that she knew her appearance on the programme would be a "political gamble", but that she wanted to "take on the myth that every politician [is] old, white, male, pale and stale" and would return home "with [her] head held high".

[33] In 2018, Stuart Campbell, a blogger running the pro-independence Wings Over Scotland website, started defamation proceedings against Dugdale about comments she made as a columnist for the Daily Record about his Twitter activity, a case he lost.

[34][35][36] On 29 April 2019, Dugdale announced she would be resigning as an MSP before the summer recess of the Scottish Parliament in order to take up the role of director of the John Smith Centre for Public Service at the University of Glasgow.

[39] On 10 October 2019, it was revealed she had also resigned from Scottish Labour that July, following disagreement with the party over leaving the European Union.

[42] In a 2016 interview with Mary Riddell for the Fabian Review, Dugdale said she was in a relationship with a woman but was disinclined to provide details of her private life.

[48] In July 2017, it was reported Dugdale was in a relationship with Mid Fife and Glenrothes MSP Jenny Gilruth, a member of the SNP, and the two had started dating around four months earlier.

[53] Her relationship with her father had been left "sad" and "sore" by his public criticisms of her on Twitter and his support for Stuart Campbell in the defamation case against her.