Coalitions of political parties are a very common feature of parliamentary systems, as well as a research subject for many studies in political science. In particular, the literature has singled out four main focuses: coalition formation; portfolio allocation; coalition stability and termination; and coalition governance. They may be also conceived as phases of coalitions’ life, respectively, the birth (formation and portfolio allocation), the “existence” in the strict sense of the word and the end. Thinking of them in these terms gives a new perspective for the study of coalition politics. It becomes a continuing process of inter-party interactions inside the context of a (life) cycle in which what an actor does in a certain moment depends both on what has occurred in the past and on the expectations about the future. This paper, by adopting this theoretical framework, gives a broad reasoned and critical review of many theoretical and empirical works concerning the phases of coalition politics. First, the developments of the subfield interested in the factors affecting the composition of the coalitions are taken into account. Subsequently, I focus on the process of portfolio allocation among parties and, thirdly, on the reasons of government terminations and the related topic of government stability. The last part is dedicated to several aspects of the so called coalition governance, placed between the first two processes and the last moment. Some promising research outlooks are finally pointed out