Dmitri Evseev has posted this draft on SSRN (forthcoming Boston University Law Review). Here is the abstract:

This Article identifies and challenges the background assumptions underlying the Supreme Court’s treatment of minor political parties in ballot-access cases; simultaneously it shows that the balancing test employed in this context is appropriate and well suited to a more informed analysis than the Court has typically chosen to undertake. The case law on ballot-access is often doctrinally inconsistent, yet almost always unfavorable to minor parties and protective of the two dominant ones. The decisions appear to rely on an unduly narrow definition of the function of elections and on a misunderstanding of the role played by minor political parties within the context of our two-party system. In fact, both competitive and deliberative theories of elections justify a more protective approach to the interests of third parties, while the legal and practical mechanisms promoting the two major parties make the Court’s concerns about political stability largely irrelevant. Fortunately, the conventional balancing test in Anderson v. Celebrezze, if properly applied, could contain all the inquiries necessary for a more accurate weighing of the relevant considerations. Thus, it is not essential for courts in these cases to apply strict scrutiny or any of the more esoteric approaches advocated in the literature in order to render judgments that are more consistent with contemporary scholarly understandings of the electoral process.