Recent studies about democratic legitimacy have been proceeding an idealistic perspective that emphasizes the adhesion of the citizens to value fundamental this government way. Some authors, however, have been indicating that approach cannot be adapted for the analysis of countries without long democratic tradition, proposing as alternative a realistic model that emphasizes as independent variable the evaluation of institutional performance. The article intends to contribute for that debate testing that alternative model for the Brazilian case, using data produced by the project World Values Surveys. The results indicate that varied related to objective evaluations concerning the performance of the institutions and of the political leaderships have a larger impact on the legitimacy levels, in comparison with the referring variables to the adhesion to value.