The debate on the argumentative turn in Public Policy and Administration (PPA), as reﬂective of the inﬂuence of political-legal theory on the discipline, is reviewed with a thorough and indepth engagement with the Argumentation Theory (AT) literature. The focus in this article is in fact of a methodological nature, since we   argue   that critical scholars - who have contributed to the general and specialized (i.e. political discourse analysis and critical contextualism) literature of AT as well as politico-legal theory - pave  way to a novel methodology which will be exemplifed through the analysis of the transparency concept.