Research on the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on the field of public communication has become a trend of the last decade. This article aims to identify the relationship between the relational qualities of digital platforms (affordances) and the processes of judgment formation during communication on urban issues. To analyze the functioning of the process of lay epistemics on digital platforms of communication between the authorities and the population, we developed a new methodology of discourse analysis by modifying the parametric model of judgment of the American social psychologist A. Kruglanski and introducing the scale of intensity of its criteria. Communication on the platform "Our St. Petersburg", representing the possibility of interaction of citizens with the city authorities, was used as an empirical base of the research. As a result of the research using descriptive and regression analysis, and a visual survey of this platform, it was found that there is interconnection between the dominance of affordances corresponding to the "authoritarian" type of governmentality and the formation of predominantly informational judgments of the behavioral type. It was also found that the criteria of the parametric model have a different impact on the formation of a certain type of judgment in the framework of digital communication.

The article reveals the content of the main trends in the development of contemporary political science in connection with crisis phenomena affecting its thematic, methodological and theoretical problems, as well as its connection with real political practice. The logic of the search for new political thinking consists in a sequential transition from solving the problems of the crisis in the field of interdisciplinary methodological synthesis to considering the unity of political methodology and ontology, and then to ontologizing political studies expressed in two ontological turns. Interdisciplinary synthesis involves overcoming the boundaries between qualitative and quantitative research, as well as the natural and social sciences. The unity of political methodology and ontology was based on the recognition of the primacy of substantive political research. The first ontological turn concerned criticism of the post-political review of politics and attempts to substantiate political theory and philosophy as a fact of politics. In the thematic plan, attention was paid to disclosing the content of the political and substantiating the relationship between philosophy and politics. The second ontological turn led to the politicization of ontology and the ontologization of politics by criticizing metaphysics, rationalism, and human subjectivity. This turn is expressed in the new political realism, which includes actor-network theory and object-oriented ontology.