Despite the growing concern over diversity, the extent to which the race and gender imbalance in academic publishing is a function of a direct form of discrimination or discrimination related to area of study or methodology is not well-documented or understood. We investigate whether the disparities in political science journals exhibit patterns of taste-based discrimination or statistical discrimination. The former stems from the preferences of decision makers, while the latter stems from the use of race or gender as proxies for unobserved or unobservable information. More specifically, we examine the claim that those who are underrepresented in the top journals are doing something different from the white men who are overrepresented.