Racial Threat and Social Control: A Test of The Political, Economic, and Threat of Black Crime Hypotheses

The often observed association between the size of the black population and the amount of social control imposed on 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 black crime 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-Based Reporting 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 substantive positive effect on black arrest levels. In contrast, no such effect is observed for black-on-black crime. These findings taken together furnish strong support for the threat of black crime hypothesis. The curvilinear relationship between the ratio of black-to-white votes cast in a general election and black arrest levels hypothesized by the political threat hypothesis does not hold for the data analyzed. Additionally, we find no empirical support for the economic threat hypothesis. The implications of these findings are discussed.