Racial Threat and Social Control: A Test of The Political, Economic, and Threat of Black Crime Hypotheses" DAVID EITLE, Florida International University STEWART J. D' ALESSIO, Florida International University LISA STOLZENBERG, Florida International University Abstract The often observed association between the sizeof the black population and the amount of social control imposedon blacks has been interpreted as consistent with one of three conceptually distinct perspectives: (1) the political threat hypothesis, (2) the economic threat hypothesis, and (3) the threat of blackcrime hypothesis. Although these three hypotheses advance differing conceptualizations of threat, adjudicating between them has proven difficult. The current study uses county-level data drawn from South Carolina's National Incident-BasedReporting System (NIBRS), race-specific voting data, and demographic data to investigate the validity of each of these racial threat hypotheses. Results from a pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis show that black- on-white crime has a substantivepositive effecton blackarrest levels. In contrast, no such effect is observed for black-on-black crime. These findings taken together furnish strongsupportfor the threat of blackcrime hypothesis. The curvilinear relationship between the ratio of black- to-whitevotes castin a general election and black arrest levels hypothesizedby the political threat hypothesis does not holdfor the data analyzed. Additionally, we find no empiricalsupportfor the economic threat hypothesis. The implications of these findings are discussed. Social scientists continue to debate whether the social control of crime is influ- enced by extralegal factors. Much of this scholarship focuses on the importance of race and social class as determinants of treatment by various social control agents. The major theoretical impetus for these inquiries is the conflict perspective and its ,.. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Direct correspondence to David Eitle, School of Policy and Management, Florida International University, University Park Campus, ECS 416, Miami, FL 33199. E-mail: eitled@fiu.edu. © The University of North Carolina Press Social Forces, December 2002, 81(2):557-576 at Florida International University on August 26, 2013 http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from