Work on party competition in established democracies, which predominantly relies on party manifesto and expert survey data, has highlighted the increasing multi-dimensionality of political competition. While prior research shows that political parties engage in competition across multiple issue dimensions, it is unclear whether voters perceive political competition in the same way. This paper fills this gap by means of a comparative analysis of citizens’ perceptions of the structure of party competition. We leverage original survey data from ten established democracies, in which respondents were asked to position parties on six distinct policy issues encompassing economic, social, and immigration concerns. Utilizing the survey responses, we use a measure of effective dimensionality (as per Koedam, Binding & Steenbergen) to capture the number of different dimensions that individual voter perceives in their party system. Additionally, we enhance our analysis by incorporating insights from an open-ended survey question, where respondents articulated the main distinctions between parties in their own words. In addition to describing citizens’ perceptions of party competition, we also examine the individual-level correlates of citizens’ perceptions of party competition.