So...  if you live in a modern city, so they still do this?

Or well, "modern" is relative. The cathedral next doors is 800 years old and the city itself is 1400 years old (that's not only before christianity in these parts, but before the pagan aesir gods). And "this" city is relative too. The original city is loctad in the northern suburb today, because while it was initially built at the innermost part of a snaky bay of the Baltic sea, the land rose and the city was moved south to the then current seashore about 1000 years ago. Since then the land has risen even further and the bay has turned into a river which empties into a lake which in turns empties into the Baltic about 70 km south of here, in central Stockholm.

So - I am trying to understand this - instead of candidates, you just have parties for people to vote for?

You vote for a party list on which the local party candidates are pre-ranked by their own party (by means of an internal party election, and lots of foul play). But since about 10-15 years back you can put an X next to a certain candidates name and so move him upwards on the list so that he - if he gets enough votes - can displace a higher ranked candidate.

This is a good reform which sadly hasn't had much result because recent experience have reaffirmed that members of of the Riksdag (our parliament) are just vote button pushers who'll do whatever the party leadership tells them to do. If they refuse and vote against their party (except in unimportant or "moral" issues) they can kiss their party careers and their comfy well payed jobs goodbye. The situation is further aggravated by the fact that we have very many parliamentarians (349) and they are generally very lowly skilled (only 2 are engineers for example). This means very few of them could get jobs that pay as well as their current jobs ($5000 a month) outside of parliament. So they're very careful not to rock the party boat.

The US system have some very important things we could learn from. If you think you have a "unitary executive" you aint seen nothing yet. Our system is in effect (if not in theory) like the Roman crisis system when they elect a dictator on a 6 month mandate, except we do it on a 48 month mandate, and this is especially pronounced when we have a miniority one party (ie soc dem) government.

And we don't have an independent judiciary.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.